


The Resurrection Men

by livenudebigfoot



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alive Nathan, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bodyguard Romance, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, M/M, Post-Canon, Trust Issues, World Travel, au where fusco must flee the united states because of his many crimes, what if god mode but it's fusco and he's bad at it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2019-11-04 03:33:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17890700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/pseuds/livenudebigfoot
Summary: A few years after faking his death, Lionel Fusco is having a bad time. Almost a decade after having his death faked, Nathan Ingram is having an arguably worse time.They're not a natural pair, but misery loves company.





	1. Chapter 1

He knows where his son is. He holds onto that knowledge like it’s a stone in his pocket, rolled smooth between his fingers. There are hardly any certainties left for him anymore - he can’t know what he’ll eat tonight, where and when he’ll sleep next, what he’ll have to do tomorrow - but he can be certain of this.

Another thing he can’t be certain of, Fusco reflects as he shivers in front of the payphone, is whether or not the kid will answer his goddamn phone.

Lee picks up on the third ring, voice thick with sleep. “Hey, Dad,” he croaks.

Fusco winces, leans against the pay phone. “Is it late?”

A soft, breathy pause as Lee checks the time. “Like three in the morning.”

“Jesus,” Fusco says. “I’m sorry, kid, I forgot where I was. I’ll let you get back t…” 

“No.” Soft rustling. He’s in bed. “No, it’s OK.”

“I won’t keep you up long,” Fusco promises, more to himself than to Lee. “How are you doing?”

“OK,” he says. “It’s finally hockey season. So I get to like... be on a team again.”

“You making friends?”

There’s a small hitch in Lee’s breath. “Kinda.”

So it’s bad, Fusco thinks.

“Is the language stuff still giving you trouble?” he asks.

“They all speak English too.”

“I know, but…”

Resigned: “I’m getting better, Dad.”

“Good,” Fusco says. “Good job.”

“I think I’m failing chem,” Lee tells him. He says it like a dare, like he’s asking Fusco to get pissed off and scream at him, as if Fusco could give a shit about grades. As if he ever would have screamed, even back before they had real problems.

“Just don’t flunk out,” Fusco tells him, firm. “If you do well in your classes, if you make friends, if you have fun: great. But more than any of that, I need a place for you to stay.”

“I could go with you,” he says. Lee always says it like that, like it’s a new idea. Like it’s never been shot down before. “I’m 16. That’s like an adult over here. I could...”

“You couldn’t.”

“I-”

“Lee. No.” He sighs deeply, shifts in place. There’s no way to be comfortable. “I want you to know that I hate being away from you.”

“I know that, Dad.”

“But this is not a life you want. It probably sounds exciting when you’re stuck going to classes you don’t care about and hanging out with rich little shitheads all day, but it’s not. It’s boring and it’s hard and it just keeps going.” Fusco takes a breath. “Not forever,” he reassures, “but it feels like that.”

“When?” Lee asks him. “When’s it gonna be over?”

“Boss says soon,” Fusco says.

“You’ve been saying soon for like three months.”

He has. He’s been saying it over and over again, whispering it like a charm to his son. To himself. Soon. He never really believed it, not once. “Soon looks different, I think,” Fusco says, “to someone like my boss.”

“I wish you could quit,” Lee says. He doesn’t mean it - Fusco can’t tell him everything but Lee’s seen enough to know there’s greater forces at work, that their freedom is balanced on the good will and the word of his father’s unseen boss - but he likes to say it sometimes. A light, kiddish push against authority. Fusco doesn’t mind. He wishes he could quit too, in an abstract kind of way.

“It’s not all bad,” Fusco says, “and it’s not forever. This is gonna be over one day. OK?”

“OK.”

“You believe me?”

Very softly, he says, “I do.”

“Good,” Fusco says. “Then what’re you worrying about?”

“Just bullshit,” Lee answers.

“You got it.” Fusco thumps his fist against the public phone. “You hang in there, OK? Play hockey, kick ass, try to have fun. They can’t take that away from you.”

“OK.”

“And get some sleep,” Fusco says. “I love you.”

“Love you too, Dad.”

And then it’s over. Their conversations are never long. Fusco hangs up the public phone, wipes it down for prints out of habit more than anything else. Then he stands there a little while, hands in his pockets, breath clouding in front of his face. Then, with a heavy, thick breath, he steps out into the snow again.

* * *

“How’s your son?” she asks.

He freezes a little on the fire escape. “Don’t you know?”

“I’d rather hear it from you.”

“Bad.” He gets back to work on the hidden camera he installed a week earlier, adhered to a railing and invisible unless you were looking for it. No one seems to be. “I don’t think I can get away with telling him it’ll all be over soon anymore.”

“I suppose you want a timeline,” she says.

Fusco sits back on his heels. “Can you  _ give me _ a timeline?” 

“No,” she says. “I don’t traffic in exact dates, Lionel. You know that.”

He does know that. He barely knows what day it is anymore; he just moves when she asks him to. He chips away at the adhesive holding the camera to the metal until it comes away in his hand.

“What I can tell you,” she says, “is that you have already begun your last mission.”

His heart thuds. “Last, huh?”

She makes a small noise, an almost laugh. Always freaks him out a little when she does that. Makes her sound too eerily alive. “The culmination of all your work so far. It won’t be easy or brief but it is...it is significant. And rewarding.”

“Like ‘cash’ rewarding?” he asks as he tucks the camera into his bag along with the others.

“Potentially,” she says, “although that’s not what motivates you, Lionel.”

“Sister, one thing you gotta learn about people,” he says as he climbs back in through the window, “is that everybody’s motivated by cash. At least a little bit.”

“It does seem to make things easier,” she muses.

“Listen.” Fusco’s voice softens, drops. He hears footsteps, he thinks, in the next room. He wouldn’t be able to ordinarily - the music downstairs is loud - but it’s heavy boots on metal stairs and Fusco can almost feel it through the floor.

“One coming up the stairs,” she says, suddenly all business.

Fusco crosses the room, tucks himself against the wall right beside the door just in time for it to open. He watches through the crack between the door and the wall as a big guy - around six foot tall, broad shoulders, lank and dark hair, leather jacket, whiff of sweat and hair gel and management about him - rolls into the room real casual. Fusco stands perfectly still against the wall as his thick tread crosses the concrete floor, as he fusses with the safe and puts something into or takes something out of it. As he rustles with paper. As he sighs deeply, curses under his breath about some coworker who always leaves the fucking window open, and slides it shut with a groan. And then he’s gone again, closing the door behind him.

All the same, Fusco stays in place a moment longer, listening hard.

“Stay,” she says unnecessarily. And then, “He went into the bathroom. You can go.”

Fusco wrenches the door open, strides out of the office, down the hall, and clatters down the metal steps. The key to this kind of thing, to going where you’re not supposed to go, is looking confident. You just need to walk fast (but not too fast), calm (but not too calm). You need to look like you belong wherever you are. He knew that before he started living this way, but having his boss in his ear makes it even easier.

The crowd downstairs is more frenzied than they were when Fusco first came in about an hour ago. Metalheads. Not his scene. He’s too old to have liked this kind of thing, even when he was a kid. Now that he’s deep into his 50’s and trying to stay on top of a serious drinking habit, the wall of sound and the overwhelming stench of sweat and beer is pretty much the last thing he wants to deal with. But it’s not about what he wants. It’s not even about this club. It’s about the quiet place next door that his boss, for whatever reason, wants eyes on. 

Anyway, Fusco doesn’t have any scene of any kind these days and a guy in a jacket and jeans doesn’t really seem out of place anywhere, so he just slides along the walls bit by bit until he’s across the club and out the door, into the cold night air. 

“We good?” he asks, under his breath. He’s not worried about being heard - English isn’t so common here that he’d be understood in passing - but one of his big fears these days is being that guy on the street corner, muttering to himself. It’s basically the last career option open to him these days.

“We’re ready,” she says.

“You want to tell me what happens next?”

She seems to consider. That’s what he guesses. It’s not like she breathes, not like she makes the noises you expect somebody to make while they’re chewing something over. “We’re going inside that building tomorrow,” she says at last.

“Are we expecting a fight?”

“We’re depending on it.”

He breathes deep. “OK.”

“Not many of them,” she reassures him. “They don’t know we’re coming.”

“If you’re sure.” 

He walks home. Not  _ home  _ \- he’s only been there a week - but Fusco likes to get comfortable when he can, and it’s comfortable to think of a place as home, any place. This one’s nice, a townhouse in a good neighborhood. Rich people on vacation or away on business; he doesn’t know and doesn’t care. He just knows that their beds are big and soft, that their showers have good water pressure, that they have on-site laundry and a kitchen where he can cook his own meals. He’s cleaner and better rested than he’s been in probably a year, and if he has to be deadly quiet, if he has to wander around in stocking feet with the lights off so the neighbors don’t see anything amiss, that’s alright by him. He takes a long, hot shower, dresses in the closest thing he has to pajamas - that’s flannel pants and a jersey for a some kind of regional sports team he picked up two missions ago - and curls up in the master bedroom.

Sleeping with the earpiece in used to feel funny. He barely notices it now.

“Hey, Machine?” he asks the dark ceiling.

“Yes?” she answers.

“This’ll help people? Whatever it is?”

“Lionel,” she says, “this will help everybody.”


	2. Chapter 2

His approach is through the back. He installed a camera on the fence, along with the one on the fire escape that looks down into the alley and the one right by the front door, hidden oh-so-carefully and tilted up to catch faces, and he guesses the Machine saw something he didn’t, ‘cause she likes the back for a way in. Fusco doesn’t argue about things like that, he just listens. The fence is chain link with serious barbed wire ‘round the top that he really doesn’t want to tangle with, but lucky for him, the Machine asks him to bring bolt cutters, so he just clips himself a hole in the fence. That’s kinda satisfying. He likes a good workaround.

He’s gotten to know the place in the past week. Not like the Machine knows it, not on that level, but his cop’s training is something that’s embedded in him on a serious, bone-deep kind of level and there’s things you just notice. 

Like what kind of building it is. It’s not a house, not a warehouse, doesn’t have windows out front to show off goods or an awning to shelter patrons. He thinks back home it’d be one of those places with the discreet little signs, those places where it’s a chiropractor stacked on a tiny law firm stacked on a shady massage parlor stacked on a bullshit-peddling spiritual healer stacked on a dentist (for legitimacy). Maybe it was at one point. He doesn’t know. It doesn’t have the discreet little sign.

Like whether it’s empty or not. It has an abandoned look about it, a worn-in, run-down shabbiness. Unwashed brickwork and an unswept stoop and trash undisturbed on the sidewalk. No light in the windows. No noise from inside. Fusco would think there was nobody in there if he hadn’t seen them. They slink out, always alone, but there’s definitely more than one of them. He’s not sure how many. The Machine is, he bets.

Like the windows. They’re dark, like he said, and they’re not so big, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was only because the lights were off and the shades were drawn. It takes a sharper eye - Fusco’s eye, as he sat on the fire escape in the metal club, installing the camera for the first time - to see that most of them are boarded up on the inside. There are old, dusty curtains wedged between the window and the boards, mimicking an interior.

That freaked him out more than anything else about the place. He’s not quite sure why.

“How many?” he asks, keeping low as he passes through the fence, barely even whispering.

“Three hostile.”

“That’s not so bad.” All the same, Fusco rests his hand on his gun. “Am I allowed to shoot?”

“You can if you have to. No one will hear.” She pauses, almost seems to hesitate. “But be careful. There may be...innocents inside.”

“OK,” he murmurs. “How are we getting in?”

“Window. Farthest on the left.”

There it is. As Fusco approaches, he sees it’s not boarded up. Just the glass is streaky, filthy. He leans in, can’t quite see. 

“Break a pane.”

Fusco knows this game. Most cops do, albeit from the other side of things. He drives his elbow into the glass, fast and sharp, knocks out some of the bigger shards before reaching inside and fumbling for the latch. 

“Little noisy, don’t you think?” he says as he unlocks the window and forces it open. It’s the first time anybody’s done that in a while. It sticks and groans.

“They’re on the upper floors. They probably won’t hear you.”

Fusco doesn’t like probably. He doesn’t listen to the Machine for  _ probably _ . “If they do?” he asks as he hoists himself up and through.

“There’s only three of them.”

“There’s one of me,” he says as he rests his sneakers gingerly on the glass-covered floor. He’s in a kitchen: dusty metal countertops, big industrial sink, rusting and grease-covered stove. He doesn’t like it. He feels penned in.

Softly, she says, “I’m here too.”

She is. She always is. There was a time, a year or so back, when he would have given anything if she could be gone for five fucking minutes. He’s come around to her since then, to a degree. He still bristles at her orders, at the way she holds back information, at the way her voice reminds him of a dead friend. But she’s dependable. She’s trustworthy.

She doesn’t want him dead, anyway.

He opens the kitchen door a crack and listens intently. He hears nothing, or almost nothing. The faint hum of something electrical from kinda far away, and that’s nearly drowned out by the distant street sounds floating in through the window behind him.

“You shouldn’t talk from here on out,” she says. “I can’t see very well in here. I can provide you only limited help. Just be quiet, take it slow, and…”

“I got it,” he tells her as he unholsters his gun and steps out of the bathroom.

The thing about working with her, he’s discovered, is that it’s real easy to stop thinking altogether. Makes things go smoother if you just do as she tells you, if you don’t let your own stupid, human assumptions gum up the works. But Fusco has a problem with his knees in that he tends to bend at them. That’s how he got into this situation to begin with. By being the kind of guy who would rather go along than think for a goddamn second. So even though his heart is pounding as he picks his way through what looks like an abandoned office, ears pricked for the sound of footsteps or breathing or the safety clicking off on a gun, it’s more with excitement than anything. 

Nobody’s acting as his eyes, his ears, his own common fucking sense.

Nobody’s telling him what to do.

It’s just him.

He clears the first floor real easy, but that’s not a testament to his skills so much as it is a sign that nobody’s been down here for a long, long time. He picks his way through the dusty office, past a cramped little dining area. Out front, he sees a big, heavy reception desk. The wall behind it bristles with tiny hooks, each labeled with a number, and Fusco finally gets a handle on where he is: a shitbag hotel.

He tries a light switch out of curiosity and finds that there’s no power. The chill in the air says there’s no heat either. Little clouds of dust burst up around his sneakers as he creeps over to a side door with a suspiciously shiny handle. He shoves it open, finds an unfurnished stairwell. The only sign of life he can see is a smooth, shiny track drawn into the dust leading from the door, across the landing, and up the stairs. Mottled on the edges with the treads of individual footprints, but thick, smooth in the middle. As if something had been dragged.

Not a pleasant thought, but it’s a way forward. A trail, clear as day. He’s only rarely so lucky. Treading soft on the concrete stairs, he creeps his way upward.

Fusco prepares for branching paths, to clear each floor, jaw tight and trigger finger twitching. But there’s kinda no need, not when he can see the thick, undisturbed dust on each landing and each door handle. Nobody goes here. They just go up.

Sure enough, the low humming sound gets louder with every step and the air gets warmer, too. Heat rises, he remembers, but the low thrum of machinery makes him think that somebody brought a generator to one of the upper floors. Off the grid, but still very much on.

From time to time, Fusco sees little dark spots and smears all on the steps. Could be blood, he guesses. It’s not really worth thinking about right now. Deal with that later.

He climbs.

It’s only a five story building, and the first floor he sees any real activity on is the fourth. The footprints get all scattered here, the door handle shines like it’s just been touched. He holds tight to his gun, presses himself delicately against the door, and he listens. 

He can almost feel the rumble of the generator. He thinks he can hear a mutter, the rise and fall of a human voice. The door has a slim, rectangular window in it and he peers through. All clear.

The door squeaks, he finds. Just a little. Not so much it gets him caught. He lets it go gently, guides it back into place so it barely makes a whisper as it shuts. 

He stands in the hall all alone and quiet for a time, just picking apart details. Hall’s a straight shot, numbered doors on either side. 401, 402, you get the idea. There’s a thick carpet, red and thick and scratchy, good for masking footsteps. The wallpaper is floral, aggressive. There are light fixtures on the ceiling every ten or so feet. They’re all off. The only light he sees is spilling out from under the door of a room about halfway down the hall. That’s where the generator is, he guesses. That’s where people are. He can hear that voice still, only now he can pick it apart and say it’s two voices, that they’re speaking Russian. He can even catch a little of it. Not that his Russian’s so good, but it’s better than it used to be. He’s been here for long enough that he can order food at a restaurant, read a street sign, say his pleases and his thank yous. Make small talk, not that he gets the chance very often.

Most of the Russian words he knew before the Machine were the kind of words you pick up when people tell you the awful thing that happened to them: gun, car, steal, hurt, drugs, boyfriend, kill. That and one hell of a lot of swear words. He can’t follow what the guys on the other side of the door are talking about - not exactly - but he’s catching the swear words. He catches the way their voices are low, hushed, tense. He catches the word kill a couple of times.

So not a good talk, he’s guessing.

Fusco comes up to the door - labelled Room 405, if that matters - and puts his eye up to the peephole. Nothing to see. He didn’t really expect anything different; it’s just the impulse you have when faced with a door that has a peephole in it, whether you’re on the right side or not. Casually, quietly, he presses on the door handle. Doesn’t move, doesn’t even jiggle. All the same, he holds very still after that, listening to the shifting tides of those voices. If they notice him pawing at their door, they don’t show it.

He stands there in the hall and kinda turns the situation over in his mind. Fusco’s not all that great at picking locks; never has been. He can do handcuffs and that’s about it. He could kick the door down, if he had to, but it’d be loud, it’d probably take more than one kick, and it’d maybe cause a few problems for him, if he did it that way. He’s got one way in, a short, straight shot, so he’d rather not bust his way into the hotel room at all if he doesn’t have to. Easier if they’re the ones passing through the bottleneck, if they come to him.

So he knocks. All conversation inside stops dead. They’re still now, listening. He knocks again: shave and a haircut, two bits.

He hears, very clearly, “What the fuck?” Then murmuring he can’t quite follow, except it sounds like questions. They’re wondering who it is, if it’s one of theirs. If it’s somebody else. He thinks he hears somebody on the other side whisper that it could be  _ one of them _ and Fusco wonders to himself if he qualifies.

Fusco steps to the side, out of the peephole’s view. He readies his gun. He waits. 

He hears footsteps approaching the door, muffled and careful. He picks up the softest thump of a shoe, the barest rustle of clothes. There’s a long pause and Fusco guesses if the guy’s not stupid, he’s looking through the peephole. He’s seeing...what? The room opposite. The hotel carpet. Maybe doors on either side. Unless that thing sees around corners, it’s not seeing Fusco.

Finally, the door opens a tiny, careful crack. Fusco squeezes himself against the wall, tries not to breathe as the blue-black muzzle of a handgun peeks out the door, as a man’s angular profile appears in the tiny gap: his nose, his sweaty brow. That’s interesting, that he’s coming out gun first. Not surprising, just interesting. If Fusco were nobody in particular, just some kind of city official looking to check on who’s camping out in the old hotel, and if the guy was quiet, polite, kept the gun hidden, he’d maybe just get busted for squatting, maybe be able to talk his way around it. This means whatever this operation is must be bad at a casual glance and it’s worth it to shoot first, lie later.

Which is kinda where Fusco’s at himself, he ruminates as the door opens a little bit wider, as the man peers out, as Fusco raises his own gun and fires neatly into the man’s temple. He drops like a stone, spills blood on the ugly carpet. There’s commotion in the hotel room beyond and Fusco steps over him, sprints into the room to find a scrawny guy cowering behind one of the twin beds, too frightened to move. 

They’ve been living in here, these two. For a while. That’s obvious. There’s a close, sweaty stink in this room, the smell of too many people and too small a space and not enough showers and no open windows. There’s a space heater humming in the corner, a hot plate plugged in on the writing desk, open suitcases, a box filled with keys that have big plastic room number tags hanging from them. Must be the whole floor’s worth.

Not his problem. The guy on the floor, that’s his problem for now.

“OK,” Fusco says with a sigh. In Russian, he says to the man, “Lie on your belly. Hands behind your back. I won’t hurt you.”

Wide-eyed, the man nods, follows instructions.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Lionel,” the Machine chimes in after a long silence. “You have them?”

“Killed one,” he says, taking zip ties from his pockets as he advances on the man on the floor, who’s looking up at him, terrified. “About to cuff the other.”

“Two?” she says.

“Yeah.”

“There are three.” 

That’s when he realizes the man on the floor isn’t looking up at him, but kinda beyond him and to his right, and  _ that’s a problem _ , he thinks to himself in the moment before an arm snakes around his neck and presses him into a chokehold,  _ that’s a real problem _ .


	3. Chapter 3

He manages to take a deep breath just before, so that’s something at least.

The bad thing is everything else.

Fusco twists, tears at his grip, kicks out with his feet, catches the guy on the floor in the face for his trouble. The guy pressing on his windpipe is bigger than Fusco, though, taller and stronger, and he drags him up, backwards, so he’s kicking the air, wasting his energy, winding out his clock. Fuck. Not working. All at once, Fusco lets himself go toddler limp, head lolling, legs dangling, and he doesn’t think that fools anybody, but it does make him too heavy to lift so Chokehold Guy lets him down a bit, lets his feet drag on the floor. Fusco’s knees go loose and bendy and he sinks a little in the guy’s grip.

This is a big, tall guy who’s holding him. Fusco’s not like that; he’s short, made shorter still by all the slumping and sinking, so this big, tall guy is way off-balance.

Fusco locks up and, with his last little bit of energy, lunges forward, dragging the guy with him.

It’s a confusing moment, the painful relief of sucking air into his lungs again, the sudden pressure of this guy falling on top of him, but Fusco doesn’t have time to be confused, so he just drives his elbow into the other guy’s ribs, makes him cry out in pain.

_Where’s his gun?_

Under the bed, he sees, dropped in the confusion.

_Where’s Floor Guy?_

Fusco looks up to find that Floor Guy has pulled himself together enough to get to his feet and pick up the chair at the writing desk. He’s holding it now, poised to swing it at Fusco. He’s being a real nervous nelly about it, in Fusco’s opinion. Spitefully, he drives his elbow into the other guy’s ribs again only to have his arm wrenched behind his back.

Chokehold Guy grips Fusco by the hair, leans on him so his face is crushed deep into the rough carpet. He says something to Floor Guy - they’re arguing, he thinks - but he can’t quite follow. Something about upstairs. Something about matches, maybe? He breathes deep, braces his free hand on the carpet, gets ready.

He listens as the chair drops to the carpet with a muted thud, to Floor Guy’s footfalls as he runs past them and out the door, without even bothering to borrow the gun from the dead guy in the doorway. Something’s up, Fusco thinks. Something’s wrong upstairs.

He lies there, Chokehold Guy’s knee digging in his back, one hand twisting Fusco’s arm tighter and tighter behind his back, the other hand pressing Fusco’s head to the ground and Fusco wonders if they want to talk to him, interrogate him. That idea gets thrown out as the hand on his head moves instead to curl around his throat. What’s happened, Fusco realizes as he starts to squirm, as his breath starts to come labored and soon not at all, is that he’s been deemed a waste of a bullet.

He shudders, bucks his hips up, kicks his legs out, lashes out with his free hand, clawing at the guy’s belt, his shirtsleeve. He shakes his head from side to side and that wins him a couple gasps of air when the grip around his windpipe loosens. ‘Cause this guy’s got big hands, but not so big that one can close around Fusco’s throat all on its own. Not so strong that the position isn’t a problem. He can feel the guy’s frustration in his twisted arm, how bad he wants to use two hands to choke Fusco from how the grip on his twisted arm gets looser, looser, looser. Just a little bit more, he thinks, kicking out and striking the guy’s knee, blinking stars out of his eyes. Just a little bit more and he can be free.

All at once, the guy’s knee isn’t in his back anymore, the hand isn’t on his throat and the guy siezes Fusco’s twisted arm and yanks him over onto his back and before he can do anything other than cry out and gasp for air, it’s both hands around Fusco’s throat, pressing down hard.

Fusco hasn’t seen his face at all, but he has a chance now, while he’s clawing at the guy’s hands. He didn’t really form any expectations in the heat of the moment, but he’s still not quite what Fusco was expecting. He’s balding. A little older than Fusco expected. Fusco was imagining more of a heavy, the kind of guy you might see standing over the shoulder of a Russian mob boss in a shitty action movie. This guy looks like a substitute history teacher. A terrifyingly strong substitute history teacher, but still. How fucking disappointing to be punked out like this.

Still, this is a victory, of a kind. It’s just not the victory he thought he’d have. Fusco’s gotten used to taking little victories where he can find them.

Like, for instance: now that they’re face to face, there’s nothing stopping Fusco from driving his knee into this guy’s balls as hard as he fucking can.

He does it twice, just for shits.

The guy folds in half, wheezing, and Fusco kicks his way under the bed.

Fusco’s not sure when he passed hiding-under-the-bed age and hiding-under-the-bed size, but in both cases, it was a long goddamn time ago. His gun slid far and he reaches for it, arm outstretched as he squeezes himself beneath the bedframe and backstrokes his way between the carpet and the floor.

A big hand closes tight on his ankle, starts to drag him backwards. He doesn’t expect to move, to be pulled, but sure enough he feels his shirt and jacket ride up, his lower back scrape along the carpet. He seizes the slats on the bed frame, sets his sneaker against the underside of the bed, halts his progress. Chokehold Guy takes a second to brace himself, yanks hard on Fusco’s leg. The bed groans a few inches across the carpet.

He speaks to Fusco then. Fusco’s not really sure what he says - his limited Russian doesn’t really cover this specific situation - but he knows that tone of voice, low and threatening but not so serious, like a guy who isn’t worried about killing you, who knows it’s only a matter of time. Fusco flattens out, stretches his arm out as far as it will go, tries to find new length, new bones, new spaces between his joints he never knew about before, anything that will make his arm long enough to reach the gun.

His fingers brush the grip, just barely. Not enough to move it.

The guy gives another almighty yank and Fusco almost loses his hold on the bed frame. He grabs on tight, both hands, like if he stays under the bed long enough this will all resolve itself. “Machine?” he whispers.

Her voice in his ear is even, calm. “Yes, Lionel?”

Chokehold Guy has his foot braced against the bed frame now, for leverage, and is pulling on Fusco’s leg like he wants to wrench it from its socket. “This is bad,” he tells her.

“Describe your situation?”

“Trapped under a bed. Guy trying to pull me out. Can’t reach my gun.”

“Hmm.”

“It’s kind of embarrassing,” he tells her. He just wants to say it out loud to someone, that he’d be embarrassed to die like this. Chokehold Guy pulls on him again and he lets out a short, sharp cry of pain.

She mulls it over for a long second while Fusco scrambles to hold his position on the bed frame. “I don’t think there’s anything I can do,” she finally says. “You’ll just have to make it less embarrassing.”

Somehow, that clarifies things.

He can feel the guy adjusting his grip on Fusco’s ankle, getting ready to pull again. Fusco silently adjusts the placement of his foot against the bed frame, loosens his grip on the slats. On the next pull, Fusco slides out up to his hips, kicks out with his free foot as hard as he can, striking out with his heel over and over again until he hears an almighty crack and a scream, feels a kneecap slide out of place beneath his foot.

Fusco drags himself further beneath the bed, scrambling and kicking until his fingers close around the grip of the gun. No time to roll over, he thinks, no time to move. He does some quick math, some pool geometry, and fires once through the mattress.

A few seconds of quiet. Then a thud as the guy crumples to the ground. Fusco exhales deep, practically melts into the carpet. “Holy shit,” he whispers, “that was stupid.”

He can feel the guy’s blood, wet on his sock.

“Are you alright, Lionel?”

“Uh huh,” he grunts as he inches his way out from under the bed.

“Did you get them?”

“Got two,” he says as he squeezes his gut through the gap between the floor and the edge.

“There are three.”

“I know.”

“You need to get three.”

He slips free, careful not to get too much blood on him. He still has to walk home after this, in public. “I know,” he says again as he rolls over, staggers to his feet. At first, he sinks, can’t quite bring himself to stand up straight - this guy definitely fucked up his knee a little - but manages to stay upright and limp his way to the door. “I’ll get you three, kiddo. Don’t worry about it.”

He steps over the corpse of the first man and into the hallway: empty. Fusco limps for the stairwell, wonders what’s upstairs that’s so important that Floor Guy had to run off to. That he didn’t even stay long enough to hit Fusco in the head or take the gun off his dead friend.

He pushes open the door to the stairwell.

Not hard to find Floor Guy. Fusco steps out into the stairwell to discover him walking backwards down the concrete stairs, bent double as he diligently splashes the contents of a gas can all over the floor. The smell is a gutpunch, powerful, unmistakable.

Buddy’s gonna light this place up.

Fusco’s not feeling so great about the gun in his hand right now, thinking about sparks and the damage they can do. Still, he’s gotta hang onto it, for show if nothing else. “Hey,” he says, softly.

Floor Guy jumps, drops the gas can. It clatters down the stairs, sloshes its contents all over Fusco’s feet. He holds very still, trembling, hand hovering generally near a suspicious-looking lump in his pocket.

Fusco shakes his head, real slow, and the guy holds his hands up by his ears.

“Don’t know if you can understand this,” Fusco tells him, “but your friends are dead.”

The guy closes his eyes, shivers harder. Fusco guesses he understands enough.

“Sorry about that,” he continues, soft and even, “but it just had to go that way. It’s not gonna go any better for you if you keep this up. You’re not a killer. Or if you are, you’re no good at it. We step away from the gas, have a talk, maybe we can work things out between us. OK?”

Floor Guy blinks at him, unmoving.

Fusco sighs. “Machine, can you translate all that into Russian for me? I don’t think he’s getting…”

All at once, Floor Guy thrusts his hand into his pocket, comes out holding tight to the suspicious-looking lump: a matchbox. He strikes a match with grim, terrible efficiency, and stands there, the flame held gingerly in his wavering fingers.

“OK,” Fusco breathes. “You made your point.”

Floor Guy speaks in stuttering, frantic Russian, gestures to the ground, and Fusco doesn’t grasp his exact meeting, but he gets the gist enough to put his gun down slowly, slowly. He places it on the step, puts his hands up with his fingers outstretched to show they’re empty. He has nothing. He’s willing to talk. Floor Guy mimes a kick at the ground and Fusco follows instructions, gingerly brushes his gun with his foot and listens as it clatters down the steps behind him.

“Please don’t set us on fire,” Fusco says. “You really don’t want to do that.”

He doesn’t look like he wants to do that, not at all. He’s sweating, shaking, breathing hard, maybe even more aware than Fusco is of how short a matchstick can be.

“Just relax,” Fusco tells him, slow and soft. “You got me. I can’t do anything you don’t want me to…”

Floor Guy shouts, points to the ground again, and Fusco knows enough to know he’s saying get down, lie down. Fusco doesn’t like his chances down there but he’s not the guy with the match, so he sinks to his knees on one step, rests his palms against another, feels the gas soak into his jeans and sting his palms.

“Be careful, pal,” Fusco murmurs. “That match is getting real low.”

The Machine provides a translation for that, or at least a translation for what she thinks he should be saying. Fusco repeats it just the same. He’s got an ear for Russian, the Machine told him once. Whatever he’s saying, it probably sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.

Floor Guy inhales wheezily, nervously, glances down at the flame in his hand, creeping ever closer to his fingertips.

He looks a little too long, and that’s when Fusco lunges.

It happens so quick, Fusco’s not even sure of what he’s doing in the moment. Or that’s what he tells himself, at least. When he thinks about it later, it happens too smoothly, too easily, to truly be an accident. It’s a lunge up the stairs, a crawl that becomes a run. It’s his arms locking tight around the guy’s legs and lifting. It’s a lift so easy, so effortless it makes him almost sad that this guy weighs so little. And it’s a drop. Or a tip, more like. Fusco just lifts him up higher than the railing and lets him fall backward. It’s not a good fall, not a satisfying action movie plunge into hidden depths. He hits the rail a couple of times on the way down, hits it hard, screams, grapples, keeps falling until he hits the concrete at the bottom with a sickening smack.

Fusco watches him over the rail for a while, waiting for him to stir, but he never does. After about a minute, there’s enough blood pooled around his head that Fusco can see it without too much trouble.

“I’m not proud of that,” Fusco murmurs to no one in particular.

“Lionel?” the Machine prompts.

“I got three,” he tells her, stepping back from the railing. “It’s over.”

“Well done, Lionel.”

Fusco doesn’t feel like it was well done. He feels like he’s glad it’s over. “You want me to get out of here before the rest of ‘em come back?”

“No,” she says, firmly. “We’re looking for someone.”

“Well, I just killed like...three someones, so…”

“He’s not one of them. He’s being held here.”

Fusco sighs deep, wipes his hands on his thighs. “Yeah, got it.”

He collects his gun from the landing as he makes his way back to the fourth floor. Better to start with their base, he figures, if he’s gonna be conducting a search. Plus he remembers that box of keys. That’ll be a help, he figures.

In the room, he looks over the two corpses he made, gives them both a little nudge to make sure they’re really dead.

They’re really dead.

So he turns out their pockets. Nothing too exciting: wallets, car keys, house or apartment keys maybe. Some chapstick. A gym pass dangling off a keyring. The kind of things you expect to find in somebody’s pockets after you kill them. Pretty much the only thing Fusco picked up from watching this building with the Machine is that these guys take it in shifts. They’re not all here all the time. They have lives, probably. Of a kind. Homes, families maybe. He shouldn’t know that, he reflects. This should be the kind of thing where there are no wallets or keys, tags are torn out of clothes to disguise their maker, fingerprints are sanded off, and if anybody dies on the job, the only way they’re getting identified is through dental records (and even then, a few key teeth have been pulled, just to throw the coroner for a loop). This operation is sloppier than it should be.

There’s the generator, humming in the corner. A hot plate, for meals. A mini-fridge crammed with food. The bathroom looks like somebody uses it, like somebody even cleans the shower from time to time, although there’s no running water, just big, heavy bottles. The beds are made with sheets he’s pretty sure somebody brought from home. They’re patterned, not hotel-issue white.

On the wall above the desk, somebody’s tacked up a little diagram drawn in pen, boxes and numbers and words he can’t read. It’s a map, he realizes slowly, a map of this floor. He plucks it off the wall, takes the box of keys too.

Sure enough, he finds as he steps back out into the hallway, the rooms marked on the maps with notations have all been modified. Padlocks roughly installed on the outside, holes sawed gracelessly through the bottoms of doors with doggy doors attached overtop. It’s a prison, Fusco realizes. A cheap-ass, low-tech prison.

Low-tech and shitty, sure, but who is he to judge? He’s low-tech and shitty too. And that’s how most Samaritan places are these days. Maybe always were. He’s no kind of expert but he knows a few things, saw that tunnel where they stacked inconvenient bodies like firewood. Maybe up at the top it was all sleek and shiny and sinister but down at the bottom it was always grungy, ugly, difficult.

He unlocks one of the doors. There’s a stink that hits him all of a sudden, a human smell like the other room, but worse, like this room got cleaned less and the door was never open and there was no air, not ever. He steps in to find no furniture, no bed, no desk, no bedside table, just the overhead light and a dirty mattress, stripped of sheets.

The next one’s like that too. If you took a picture - and he does, so the Machine can see - Fusco wouldn’t be able to tell they were different rooms.

The next one after that is different only in a small way. There’s a dark stain in the mattress, a splatter on the wall. A hole, he can see, all the way through the mattress and down through the floor where the bullet eventually stopped.

He’s beginning to not feel so bad about throwing that one guy down the stairs.

He can tell that the last room is different from the moment he opens the door. The smell is like a wall he runs into, strong and horrible and chemical and weirdly familiar. He grips his gun as hard as he can, gets ready to get attacked, gets ready to see something bad. He doesn’t at first. Not until he looks in the bathroom, in the bathtub.

He knows what he’s seeing right away. Most other people wouldn’t, and good for them. He knows it from back when he was with HR, when people had to get rid of bodies. His usual strategy was to run them out to Oyster Bay, make them dig the hole, shoot them right next to it, and cover the whole thing right up. It’s not a thing he’s proud of, but he figures there are worse things you could do to somebody. Worse things you could do with what’s left of somebody.

‘Cause there was this one guy he knew who didn’t bury bodies, didn’t like the work. He used lye instead.

_Human soup_ , he thinks, unbidden, and then he has to step outside the room for a little while and just crouch in the hallway, hands on his head, trying not to be sick.

“Lionel?” the Machine asks as he gags quietly, miserably.

“They’ve been cleaning house,” Lionel says through his fingers. “Everybody they were keeping in here is dead. Whoever we’re looking for, I think they might be a lost cause.”

“You have to keep looking,” she says.

“You don’t understand what I just saw; there’s a…”

“You have to.”

So he sits there a real long moment, on his haunches with his back to the wall. So he takes a few deep, deep breaths.

He has to. He comes to terms with that on his own, quietly.

If there’s anybody left alive in here, he knows where they’ll be.

He returns to the stairwell, up the gas-covered stairs to the fifth floor.

As he pushes open the door, a buzz in his ear, the warmth in the air tells him there’s another generator up here. There’s something worth keeping warm. There’s an empty gas can lying on its side. Somebody used a lot, just up here. The gas has seeped deep into the carpet, made a burgundy snail trail up the hall and into one of the rooms, the door hanging akimbo. Cautiously, gun in hand, Fusco follows it.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting in there. An empty room. A stack of stolen cash. A pile of smashed electronics, stuffed to the gills with sensitive information. A dead body.

It’s a live one.

That’s what he’d been hoping for, but something about the sight of the man he finds crouched on the bathroom floor makes Fusco’s stomach sink.

It’s the guy’s frailty that does it. His hands are cuffed to the pipe that connects the bathroom sink to the wall, and the bones in his wrists stand out sharp. He’s crouched there on the chipped tile floor, cuffed to the s-bend of a sink, knees drawn tight to his chest, skin pale, hair long and wispy and hanging in his face, completely drenched in gasoline, and somehow it’s his wrist bones that make Fusco feel so fucking sad.

The guy breathes loud, ragged. His shoulders shake. He’s peering up at Fusco through the curtain of his hair.

He is very, very afraid.

“OK,” Fusco says to him, although obviously nothing is. He sinks to one knee, fumbles for his phone in his jacket pocket. “You understand English?”

The guy gives a nod so small it’s hard to tell if he even moves at all. He flinches as Fusco reaches out, pushes the wet hair out of his face. Hard to put an age to that mug. Deep lines on the brow, dark circles under the eyes, blonde hair going gray. More than anything, he seems tired. “‘S OK,” Fusco says to him. “You’re gonna be fine.”

Poor guy’s trembling so hard Fusco has to hold him steady as he takes a picture of him.

“Took you a picture,” he tells the Machine, as if she didn’t know the second the shutter snapped. “Is that your boy?”

She pauses for a moment. There’s algorithms being run now, he knows, to identify this man’s face. It doesn’t usually take her so long.

“That’s him, Lionel,” she says at last. “Leave now. Take him with you.”

He breathes a deep sigh of relief. He had a feeling this might be a rescue mission, but he knows by now that the Machine can be tough to read and that things aren’t always so noble. He would’ve felt bad, putting down somebody who looks this rough. “OK, pal,” he says, shrugging off his backpack and rummaging around inside. “You’re coming with me.”

The guy gives no sign of understanding. Maybe he doesn’t speak English; maybe if you’ve had a hard enough time you’ll just nod to anything anyone asks you. He goes real tense when Fusco pulls the bolt cutters out of his backpack, tries to inch away as best he can, chain tight on the pipe.

“C’mon, buddy,” Fusco tells him, tugging at his wrist. “These are for the chain, not you.” He taps the bolt cutters on the chain that connects the cuffs, hoping that’ll make sense to him even if he can’t understand a word Fusco’s saying.

Hesitantly, the man lets the chain go slack enough that Fusco can catch it between the bolt cutters. It’s harder than the fence outside, that’s for sure, but they’re not great handcuffs, so they snap apart eventually. The man yanks his hands away, chains clattering, and leaps to his feet.

What Fusco realizes very quickly is that anybody looks frail and sad when they’re bedraggled and scared and curled up in a little ball. Even this guy, who’s at least six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and lean, wiry. Veins jump in his wrists as he clenches and unclenches his fists.

“OK.” Fusco keeps his voice real level as he stares up at the prisoner. “If you got anything worth keeping in here, you better go get it right away, ‘cause we gotta get out of here.”

The prisoner takes a deep, shuddering breath. A drop of gasoline rolls down the bridge of his nose. “Who are you?” he whispers hoarsely.

So he does speak English. At least a little bit. Might even be American, though it’s hard to hear any accent in a voice that ragged and broken. “Not important,” Fusco tells him as he cautiously rises to his feet. “My boss asked me to get you out of this place, so that’s what I’m doing. You have anything you need to get, or…?”

Fusco jumps when the man’s closed fist strikes the door frame. Has to hurt to do that. The prisoner’s skin is thin and pale. Around gritted teeth he asks again, “Who are you?”

Fusco takes his time putting his hands up, showing his open, empty, friendly palm, his other hand with just the bolt cutters in it. “That’d take a while to explain,” Fusco says, “and we don’t have that kinda time. All I’m here to do is make sure you get out of here in one piece, so if you don’t need to grab anything from in here…” Fusco takes a slow, careful sidestep towards the bathroom door only to get grabbed and unceremoniously dragged against the wall by his jacket lapels.

He’s not that strong, Fusco notes as the towel rail digs against his back. He’s just hopped up on fear. He tightens his fists in Fusco’s jacket. To stop his hands from shaking, Fusco thinks. “I don’t know who you are either,” Fusco murmurs very gently, eyes locked on his. They’re brighter than he expects, keener. More sane. Very pale blue. “You don’t hear me making a fuss.”

The man breathes deep, thick, shuddering, frustrated.

“I’d say you don’t have anything to worry about anymore,” Fusco adds, keeping his voice low and soft, “but I’m not in any position to throw promises around like that. I can tell you that this,” he tilts his head a little, hopes that conveys the gasoline, the handcuffs, this room, whatever the fuck all this is, “is over for you. That’s all.”

“What do you want me for?” he whispers.

“I don’t know.”

He twists Fusco’s coat, yanks up so he’s lifted a little, back grinding against the towel rack, toes scrabbling on the tile. “Fuck you,” the prisoner hisses in his face. “Tell me.”

“I really don’t know,” Fusco says around the pressure on his throat, up under his jaw. His legs twitch, scramble for purchase. Second time being strangled in under an hour and it stings his pride, just a little.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he spits.

“Oh, OK, pal,” murmurs Fusco, who’s kind of lost his patience at this point. He drives his foot into the prisoner’s knee so he drops Fusco with a yell, slugs him in the jaw with the bolt-cutter hand, and lays him out on the bathroom floor.

Then Fusco stands there for a while, rubbing at his throat. There used to be a mirror on the medicine cabinet above the sink, Fusco notices, but somebody broke it a long time ago and dug out all the sharp pieces. So the prisoner wouldn’t have a weapon, he thinks, or maybe so the prisoner couldn’t take the easy way out. Either way, it’s probably for the best. Fusco doesn’t want to know what he looks like right now.

“Lionel?” the Machine asks him patiently. “What’s happening?”

“I hit him,” Fusco says, dropping the bolt cutters and sinking to his knees beside the prone man. “I hit our guy.”

The Machine almost seems to hesitate, like she’s finding a delicate way to ask her next question. “Is he alive?”

Fusco presses two fingers to the prisoner’s throat and feels the gentle thrum of a pulse. When he’s checking out his head - a dark bruise on his temple that might be a goose egg later, but no bleeding or fractures that Fusco can find - the prisoner groans, twitches away from his touch. “He’s alive, yeah. Just knocked out.”

“Take him with you.”

Fusco gives the prisoner a real serious once over again - skinny, yeah, but tall and wiry - and thinks about the stairs he climbed to get here. He sighs, real deep.

* * *

It’s easier than he thinks it’s going to be, but only in the sense that it turns out to not be impossible. He drapes the prisoner’s body over his shoulders, holding him by one arm and one leg, and slowly makes his way down the stairs.

He takes breaks. A lot.

He pulls him out of the stairwell, past the dead man, and through the ground floor: through the lobby, through the offices, back into a small kitchen, and finally through the back door, which he unlocks and carefully closes up again so it all looks a little like how he left it. He drags the prisoner through the fence, down the alley and there in the shadows, before they have to be around people again, Fusco hoists the prisoner up to something like standing and drapes his wiry arm across his shoulders. He weaves a little as he steps out of the alley and onto the sidewalk, mostly because he wants to seem drunk but also because he’s so tired and this guy’s fucking heavy.

They stagger along, weaving, until a taxi stops for them.

“You American?” the driver asks as Fusco shoves his new pal into a kind-of-seated position in the back seat.

“Yup,” Fusco grunts as he clambers the rest of the way in and slams the door shut behind him. Not a lot of room in the back and he finds himself crammed up against this guy. In the car’s dim light, the prisoner looks old and thin and too fragile to hit. Fusco regrets it, at least half because he had to carry him all that way, but also because it doesn’t feel right, looking at him now. Fusco puts an arm around him, slides his hand between the guy’s head and the car door.

“Your friend stinks, American.”

Fusco fumbles one-handed in his pocket until he can peel a note off the wad of cash he carries, ‘cause the Machine has him off plastic for whatever reason, and passes it to the driver. “I know,” he says. “Sorry about that.”

The cash must be enough, Fusco guesses, ‘cause the driver says no more about it.

* * *

“What do we do with him?” Fusco asks. He dips the washcloth back into the bowl, gets back to working the gasoline out of the prisoner’s hair. Sometime after he finished wrestling him up the stairs and into the master bedroom, he noticed the guy’s skin was turning red and blotchy and figured the gas was bad news. If Fusco’s gonna be putting up with this guy for the foreseeable future, he should be able to light a smoke near him without being afraid he’ll go up like a roman candle.

“Look after him,” the Machine says. “You’re doing well so far.”

Fusco squints down at his bruised, unconscious, blotchy charge. “That’s up for debate.”

“You’re doing well enough,” she amends. “As long as you keep him safe.”

“For the record, it’s pretty hard to want to keep someone safe after they try to kick your ass for rescuing them.”

“If you were in his position,” she points out, “you wouldn’t trust you either.”

That’s fair. Fusco doesn’t really trust much of anybody these days. “But I’d play along,” he says. “At first, anyway. See where it was all going. Wherever I was gonna take him, it couldn’t be worse than that.”

She makes a small, doubtful sound and Fusco thinks about times when he could’ve asked for help but didn’t, ‘cause of a weight on his mind, a trap in his head. “How are you feeling, Lionel?” she asks him, as if she can hear his thoughts too.

“Amazing. Never better.”

“Lionel,” she chides.

He thinks about it, really thinks about it. “Tired, mostly,” he admits. “I’m not hurt bad; I’m just...I dunno, snappish.”

“Guilty?” she asks.

If she can feel anything - and Fusco’d be more surprised if she couldn’t feel anything at this point - he’s pretty sure the Machine feels a hell of a lot guiltier about nights like this than he does. She’s not a big fan of killing. Neither is he, when you get right down to it. On days when he walks invisibly, when he talks in circles, and nobody gets hurt at all, he gets to feel slick and confident and in control, even though he’s never more like a puppet than in those moments. On nights like this, when the Machine does all its terrible math and decides the world’s better off if it’s short a few scumbags, he feels sick and sad but wildly, powerfully in-control. His hand shakes as he squeezes water out of the washcloth. He thinks about the young man at the bottom of the stairwell.

“Not exactly,” he says. “Hard to feel too bad for those guys, you know?”

“Is it?” she asks. He guesses she knows their favorite colors, what their baby pictures look like. It’s not so clear-cut for her.

“Hard for me.” He cleans behind the guy’s ears. “I don’t feel good about it either, though. What I saw in there…”

He hopes she’ll interrupt him but she doesn’t, just lets the sentence hang, just waits with perfect patience.

“Would you like to see a therapist again?” she asks. “It’s short notice and we’re about to be very busy, but I can arrange it.”

“No thanks,” he says, firmly. He’s done it a couple of times since they started this and it just feels ugly, miserable, vulnerable. And that’s just the stuff he doesn’t have to lie about.

“I guess there will be time for that later,” she muses.

“Guess so.”


	4. Chapter 4

He’s shaving when he hears the tentative rattle of the headboard. The prisoner is awake.

Fusco ignores it for a while, takes his time getting a clean shave. Not often he has the resources to be fussy: the razor, the shaving cream, the sink, the mirror, the time. It’s kind of hard to come by all at once. He’s grown his share of beards in the past couple of years and none of them by choice.

This could be the last time he’s clean shaven for a long goddamn while.

Nice place for it, he thinks mildly. He’s not the kind of guy who can tell if the long, gleaming marble counter tops are the real deal, how much the tiling costs per square foot, whether the shiny silver fixtures are steel or chrome, whether the thin mat beneath his feet was woven by hand or not, but standing there draped in the bathrobe somebody left hanging from the door, curling his toes into the warmth of the heated floors, fresh from the shower, it all seems pretty nice.

Fusco washes the shaving cream off his face, borrows some aftershave from the medicine cabinet. It’s one of those dark, rich scents, like how he imagines sipping whiskey while lounging in a leather chair in some kind of old boy’s club smells.

In the next room, the headboard rattles again. 

He sighs, rubs the last of the aftershave into his jaw. Better roll out the red carpet, he guesses.

Fusco strolls into the bedroom to find the prisoner tearing at zip tie pinning his wrist to the wrought-iron headboard with the same kind of frantic energy as a coyote about to chew its own leg off to get out of a trap. It’s not an unfair reaction to waking up in this situation.

Fusco leans casually against an elaborately-carved wardrobe. “Good morning, sunshine.”

The prisoner freezes. He seems to shrink all of a sudden, locking up around the locus of his restrained wrist, arms and legs drawn in tight. His eyes are on Fusco, watching for what he’ll do next.

Fusco figures he could build on this, if he had to. The guy’s already scared shitless; it’d be an easy thing to lean into that and make it real clear, right up front, who’s in charge around here. If he’s gonna have to babysit this guy - and it’s looking more and more like he’s gonna have to - a scared-straight piece of human luggage feels pretty simple to deal with right about now. Fusco’s back still aches from when the guy shoved him into the towel rack. He’d like to deal with as little of that shit as possible.

The prisoner’s eyes, bright blue and hunted, stand out in his pale, malnourished face. His breath comes in quick, fearful little bursts.

Fusco’s such a sap.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he says at last. “Sorry I had to cuff you like that, but I don’t trust you yet.”

The prisoner curls up tighter like he’s trying to disappear.

“You got a name, pal?” Fusco tries.

His stare is bright, baleful, flinty.

“OK.” Fusco shoves his hands into the pockets of his robe. “We don’t have to do names right now. You got any allergies or anything?”

He blinks.

“Food allergies,” Fusco clarifies. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you last ate something, but...I’m guessing too long, probably. I have a stir-fry. Nothing special, just...you know, leftovers. But I think you should eat. You allergic? Vegetarian?”

The prisoner has his head and limbs drawn so tight into himself that Fusco can barely see him shake his head.

“OK,” Fusco says, backing his way towards the door. “Sit tight, I’ll be right back.”

_ Sit tight, _ Fusco thinks to himself as he pads barefoot down the dark hallway. Mean thing to say, under the circumstances.

_ Guy’s got a right to be scared, _ he reminds himself as he stands in front of the humming microwave, watching leftover chicken stir-fry rotate in the yellow light.  _ Anybody would be, in his shoes. This’ll help. Food lowers defenses like nothing else. Especially when you’re as hungry as that guy looks. _

Fusco fills a tall glass with clean, cold water and sets it on a tray beside the plate. 

The prisoner drops into a guilty crouch on the bed as Fusco pushes the door open. His wrist is red and rubbed raw in a way that tells Fusco he was fighting like hell to get free the whole time Fusco was downstairs. Again, Fusco supposes he’s got a right. He opts to pretend not to notice.

“It’s not the Ritz,” Fusco says as he sets the tray on the bed, close enough that the prisoner could reach it if he relaxed a little. “But, you know, it’s food. Eating without a fork might be rough, but...” He settles against the wardrobe again with a shrug. “I’m sure you get it.”

The prisoner’s shoulders drop very slightly as he eyes the plate. He’s weighing options, glancing from the plate to Fusco and back again.

“If I wanted to kill you,” Fusco points out, “or drug you or something, I’d have done it while you were passed out. None of this cloak and dagger shit.”

That seems to make a kind of sense to the prisoner, who inches slightly closer to the tray. He flexes the hand pinned to the headboard, eyes Fusco hopefully.

Fusco shakes his head. “No way.”

The prisoner rolls his shoulders back, as if acknowledging that it was a long shot, and takes the glass of water. It sloshes a little over the rim of the glass as he lifts it to his mouth. His hand is shaking.

He gulps every drop of the water down in one go.

“Holy shit,” Fusco says, comfortably.

Emboldened, the prisoner takes a piece of chicken from the plate and pops it into his mouth. He chews slowly, delicately, with his eyes closed. He holds very still. He swallows.

Without opening his eyes, he asks, “Where are we?”

“We’re not doing addresses.” He takes a careful step towards the prisoner and sets him off again, eyes open, bolt upright. “Hand me that,” Fusco says, pointing at the glass. “I’m gonna get you more water.”

The prisoner hesitates, takes the glass in his hand in a considering way, like a man who’s really conscious that if he had to, he could throw it at Fusco’s head. He could smash it against the tray or the headboard and make himself a knife. He’s holding a lot of possibilities there in his hand.

But he’s thirsty, so he hands the glass back to Fusco.

“We’re in Moscow,” Fusco says as he goes into the bathroom. “If you didn’t know already.”

Over the sound of running water, Fusco hears him say, so soft he might as well be talking to himself, “I was pretty sure it was Russia.”

Fusco comes back, sets the refilled glass on the tray. The prisoner takes a grateful sip as Fusco returns to his spot at the wardrobe. He’s trying to be predictable, stable. Somebody you can relax around, at least a little.

“The people?” the prisoner asks, tentatively. “The ones who were...keeping me.”

“They’re dead,” Fusco tells him.

“Oh.” He takes a piece of broccoli from the plate and chews it slowly and thoughtfully. “Good,” he says at last. His smile is weak, thin-lipped, and something about the way his eyes crinkle seems suddenly, uncomfortably familiar, although Fusco can’t quite place him. “What…” He pauses, takes another gulp of water, clears his throat. “What year is it?”

Fusco sinks a little against the wardrobe. Not  _ What’s the date? _ Not  _ What month is it? _   What year? Jesus Christ, that’s a sad question. Fusco tells him like he’s breaking bad news: “2019.”

The prisoner lets out a very long, very slow breath, like he’s deflating. He doesn't move. He doesn’t blink. Before Fusco can ask if he’s OK, he chugs the rest of his water and sets the glass back down on the tray with a muted thunk. “I haven’t…” His voice shivers. His eyes have a feverish shine to them. He turns suddenly, looks Fusco directly in the eyes, and says in a surprisingly calm voice, “I literally can’t remember the last time I ate broccoli.”

“Oh.” Fusco squirms a little under his direct gaze. “That a good thing or a bad thing?” 

“I never had a strong opinion. Why did you…?” He trails off, voice bending, rippling. “Why did you do...this?”

“Save you, you mean?”

“Is  _ that  _ what you did?” he asks, desperate and sharp.

“Well,” Fusco says, staying right where he is but keeping his voice real calm and even, “I know hanging around me ain’t exactly Disneyland. And I was only in there about an hour; I don’t know all that much about what that place was or what you went through in there. But from what I saw, this,” and he twirls his finger, encompassing the room, the bed, the food, himself, “is at least a little bit better.”

The prisoner blinks up at him, eyes brimming with the exact kind of hatred you feel when somebody you think is a complete fucking asshole makes a decent point. Delicately, carefully, he asks, “Who do you work for?”

“You don’t get to know that,” Fusco says. “Sorry. It’s a pain in the ass and I can tell you don’t like it. But that’s just how it has to be.”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“Dunno,” he says. “My boss told me where to find you, told me to bring you back here and keep you safe. So that’s what I’m gonna do, no questions asked. I don’t know why I saved you. I don’t even know who you are. I just know I’m supposed to look after you. For a little while, at least. When she lets me know more about the plan, I’ll tell you about it.”

The prisoner falls quiet for a moment. “ _ She _ ?” he probes.

Fusco snatches the empty glass from the tray. “I’m getting you a refill.”

“Can I know your name, at least?” the prisoner calls to Fusco as he turns on the tap. “Or. Or any name. Even if it’s fake. Just…” His voice softens. “What do I call you?”

A twinge in his gut.  _ Sap. _

Fusco tilts his head, waits for the voice in the earpiece that’s been sitting quiet all this time to chime in, tell him who he’s supposed to be for the prisoner, what his quick-change identity is today. She stays quiet.

“Really?” he murmurs, letting the sound of splashing water cover for him.

“You can be honest with him,” the Machine says.

Fusco hasn’t been honest with much of anybody in the past couple of years. Certainly not strangers. When he steps out of the bathroom and hands the glass to the prisoner, it’s harder than he expects to say, “Uh. It’s Lionel.” His voice sticks in his throat.

The prisoner looks like he doesn’t believe him, but Fusco wouldn’t believe Fusco either, so that’s fair, he guesses. “Lionel what?” the prisoner asks as he brings the glass to his lips.

“Just Lionel,” he says, a bit stubborn, a bit precious about throwing his name around. “What about you? What should I be calling you?”

“Should my name be fake too?” 

“Can be if you want,” Fusco says with a shrug. “But for the record, mine’s not fake.”

“You hesitated.”

“I don’t go by my real name all that much anymore,” Fusco tells him. “I’m out of practice.”

The prisoner blinks at him, suspicious but in a lighter kind of way, a less fearful kind of way.

“Besides,” Fusco adds, “who  _ pretends  _ to be named Lionel?”

A smile flits across his face, small and sharp and unexpected and Fusco gets that jolt of recognition again, that faint familiarity. 

He leans forward, studies the prisoner’s face. “We haven’t met before, have we?”

Amusement lingers in the lines around his eyes. He’s a little bit bolder when he says, “That’s an old line.”

“I mean it,” Fusco says, studying the creases around his eyes, the set of his mouth, the shape of his nose.

“No,” the prisoner says. “I don’t think we’ve met before.” He hesitates, teeters there, holding the glass in tight in his hand, poised on the edge of honesty. At last, he says, “My name is Harold Wren.”

The flat, nasty bark of laughter that bursts out of Fusco makes the prisoner jump, slosh water all over the bed. 

“Sorry,” Fusco says, faintly ashamed at how shaken he looks. He returns to the bathroom, grabs a dry towel. “But that was a bad fake name, pal.”

As Fusco faces him again, holds out the towel, he finds that the prisoner looks more fearful than he has since the beginning. His eyes are darting, frantic, the eyes of a man terrified to be caught in a lie ‘cause he’s not sure what the consequences will be.

“I know that guy,” Fusco says as he shoves the towel into the prisoner’s chest until he takes it, numb-fingered, wide-eyed. “He’s almost the only guy on the planet I know you’re not.”

“You know Harold?”

“Yeah.” Fusco leans in and studies him, looks hard for the thing that makes him so familiar. “How did  _ you  _ know him?”

The prisoner swallows hard, collects himself, squeezing tight at the plush towel. “He...You know him? Know him now? He’s alive, he’s, he’s, he’s alright? Harold’s…?” All at once he trails off, wilts. Must be something he sees in Fusco’s face.

Fusco wishes for a better poker face. He wishes this didn’t sting him so bad he can’t help but look hurt when he thinks about what happened to Glasses. What happened to John.

“Last saw him in 2015,” he starts, trying to be gentle with the prisoner, who’s kinda sinking into himself. “There was, uh. An accident, I guess I’ll call it. That’s the last I saw of him. His chances, uh, weren’t great. But I’ve seen him come back from worse.” Fusco’s not sure if that’s true, but he’s been telling himself that for a while, so it seems fair to share. “And he’s that type of guy, to disappear and turn up again when you least expect him.” 

The prisoner nods, slow and sadly, as though he knows just what Fusco means. 

“I don’t know enough about it to say one way or the other if he’s alive,” Fusco says at last. He adds, a bit uselessly, “You OK?”

“He was my friend,” the prisoner says, very softly. “Maybe my last friend. I assumed he had died a very long time ago, so this is...better. I guess. More time than I let myself believe he had.”

They sit quiet for a long moment, the prisoner staring at his hands. “How did you know Harold?” he asks.

“Worked for him,” Fusco tells him. “He was a good boss, if it matters. Tough but fair.”

“You don’t seem like someone that Harold would work with,” the prisoner says.

Fusco exhales, leans back. “Yeah, he said that to my face a couple of times.”

The prisoner makes a soft noise, an almost-laugh. “Were you friends?”

Fusco thinks it over. “Dunno,” he says at last. “I liked him. He...I think he got to like me too, after a while. I know he trusted me, at least a little. That’s not nothing.”

The prisoner snorts. “You could count the people Harold trusted on one hand. And you wouldn’t need all of your fingers.”

“Think you’d maybe need a couple of fingers from the second hand, at the end,” Fusco tells him. “But that sounds about right. He didn’t have all that many friends, either.”

“Is that an accusation?” the prisoner asks. 

Fusco shrugs. “I’m not gonna pretend I know who Poindexter’s friends are. I’m just saying that all the ones I’ve heard of who I don’t know personally are dead.”

He falls silent again, eyes in his lap. He looks small all of a sudden, there on the bed, and Fusco’s hit with the overwhelming urge to pat him on the shoulder, to cut the zip tie on his wrist and damn the consequences, to tell him that even if he is a liar, he’s sorry for his loss and it’s all gonna be OK in the end, even though he can’t make promises. “You gonna be OK?” Fusco asks him, instead of doing any of that.

The prisoner doesn’t seem to hear Fusco, doesn’t even lift his head. “Nathan,” he says softly. “My name is Nathan Ingram.”

Recognition takes all the air out of Fusco. Of course.  _ Of course _ it’s Nathan Ingram. How could it not be Nathan Ingram? Everybody knows Nathan Ingram. Everybody knows his name, knows his face. How could Fusco be so fucking stupid not to recognize him? The guy was everywhere: articles about how his company invented such-and-such a thing or he won such-and-such award for services to humanity. You’d see him on TV taking interviews from serious journalists and testifying before Congress and charming the skirts off talk show hosts. He’d take over newsagents every so often, squinting benevolently from the covers of magazines. Even after he died, that headshot floated around the news cycle, a nasty reminder that no matter how important you were, no matter how much money you had, you weren’t safe in this world anymore. 

Even after the news moved on to other things, there was still that time Reese made him look into where Finch came from. Fusco looked through the guy’s old yearbook photos, for fuck’s sake.

But then, it’s been almost a decade since Fusco thought about him, since he died. And he’s older now, and thinner, and he’s been through god knows what. And even if you think you know what Steve Jobs looks like, you might not recognize him without the turtleneck. It’s hard to see Nathan Ingram the billionaire in this pathetic figure crouched on the bed in dirty pajamas.

“Holy shit,” Fusco whispers.

Ingram sips at his water. “Am I presumed dead?”

Fusco nods.

“Thought so,” Ingram murmurs. He puts the glass aside.

“Not, uh...not to be rude or anything,” Fusco begins, “but why...aren’t you?”

Ingram pauses, like he’s thinking over how to begin. “You know what happened?”

“The explosion. 34th Street Ferry. Everyone knows.”

“You a New Yorker, Lionel?” Ingram asks.

Fusco keeps quiet.

“I was held in a private medical facility for a while, after the...accident. Bed bound. Couldn’t walk at first. Think I may have been in a coma for a while, but I don’t...they never told me how long.”

Fusco studies his face. He’s calm now, eerily calm. He sounds a little like he used to in interviews: the serious ones, not the charming ones. His lips are cracking.

“I was still being held by the United States government at that point,” he continues. “But somewhere along the line, I changed hands.”

“To the people I took you from?”

He considers. “Hard to say. They got less...professional as time went on. I heard different names. Decima Technologies at one point. Samaritan at another. I don’t believe they’re affiliated with any government. They’re their own...entity.”

Fusco feels his chest go tight with horror. “How long were you in that place?”

“Not long,” Ingram says. “Not even a month. They move me...they used to move me. Pretty often.”

“You know what they wanted you for?” Fusco asks.

Ingram leans back against the headboard, slightly boneless. “My work,” he says. “Harold’s work.”

“Lionel,” the Machine interrupts. “A moment? I’d like to speak to you privately.”

Fusco pushes his hands into the pockets of his robe, stands up straight. “Gimme a second,” he says, both to Ingram and the Machine.

Ingram looks suddenly fearful. “You’re leaving? Now?”

“Yeah,” he says, faintly apologetic as he makes for the bedroom door. “Just for a second. Sit tight, OK? Eat your food.”

As the door swings shut, Fusco hears this soft, half-wounded sound and Fusco knows it wasn’t just the hinges squeaking. 

Fusco trots down the hall, bounds down the stairs, breezes through the kitchen where he still hasn’t quite cleaned up from dinner. At the back door, he slides boots onto his feet, throws on his weather-beaten parka, and steps into the back garden.

This is where he smokes, when he smokes. Here, by the wrought iron patio furniture, lightly blanketed with snow. He doesn’t really do anything else outside the house, for fear that the neighbors will see him, but the Machine told him the people who live in this house don’t smoke, that the smell will be a dead giveaway. So he stands just here, where he’s not visible, where he’s hidden on all sides by the garden wall, and he listens.

He never hears much; it’s fucking cold out. Kids sometimes, sprinting along the back alley on the other side of the wall, racing each other home from school. 

“OK,” Fusco whispers as he fumbles for the squashed packet of cigarettes he knows is in his coat pocket. “You want to explain?”

The Machine begins: “Almost three weeks ago, Nathan Ingram was transferred between handlers in a parking garage. During the transfer, he struggled briefly. One of his captors retaliated by slamming him onto the hood of a nearby car. The hood Nathan was wearing over his face slipped. The car had a dashboard camera that was activated by the movement and impact.”

Fusco takes a cigarette in his mouth, shields it with trembling hands as he lights it. “Did you know before then that he was alive?”

“No,” she says. “They hid him from me very well.”

“Jesus Christ,” Fusco murmurs. “What are we going to do with him?”

“Protect him,” she says. “Bring him to safety.”

“Where’s that?”

“The two of you will leave the country tomorrow. Keep him safe, stick together, listen to me, and everything will be fine.”

“That’s all I get?” Fusco asks.

“Of course not, Lionel.”

“Don’t  _ of course not _ me; you’ve been telling me this is the last one for weeks.”

“This  _ is  _ the last one,” she assures. “I don’t always tell you everything, Lionel, but I don’t lie. You know I don’t lie.”

He knows. It’s obnoxious. He can’t even be suspicious of her.

“I made you a promise,” she says. “I swore to you that one day, you and your son could live together without fear, that you could return to New York, that you could exist under your own name again. I promised you that, Lionel.”

He knows. He knows. He never forgot.

“Deliver Nathan Ingram to safety, and I will give you what I promised.”

He coughs a little. A tiny plume of smoke bursts from his lips.

“I’m sorry it’s taken so long,” she says. “But it really will be soon.”

“Relax,” he says, voice trembling a little. “I believe you.”

“I’m glad, Lionel.”

A companionable silence falls between them. Fusco takes a long drag on his cigarette. “So what can I tell him? About all this. You.”

“As little as possible,” she says. “I don’t know him now. He seems...fragile. I don’t know what that information would do to him.”

“Yeah. Yeah, about that. Are you sure we have to take off so soon? I know he was a big important guy once upon a time, but now…”

“He’s still important.”

“I won’t argue with that, but the guy’s a basket case. He’s been through too much for too long. He’d have a hard enough time if he was someplace quiet, recovering, with like a doctor or something. Running around with me is gonna be rough on him.”

“He might surprise you,” the Machine says, firmly.

Fusco spends a moment in quiet thought. “That guy helped build you, huh?”

“He did,” she says.

“So does that make him like your dad?” Fusco asks. “Your  _ other  _ dad, I mean.” 

“Something like that.” She pauses. “He was an absentee parent. But...supportive.”

“I get it,” Fusco tells her. He doesn’t. Not from experience anyway. “He’s important to you.”

“Everyone’s important, Lionel.”

* * *

Fusco pushes in the door to the master bedroom to find Nathan Ingram trying to pull himself free again. He’s twisted himself around, his feet braced on the headboard. His wrist twists at an awkward angle, the zip tie biting deep into his pale skin.

“Jesus Christ,  _ stop that _ ,” Fusco snaps.

Ingram freezes, guilty, fearful, terrified of what’s about to come. 

Fusco walks up close, peers at his wrist. “You’re gonna cut yourself,” he murmurs. He digs in the pocket of his robe and pulls out the knife. A quick flick and the blade is out, a little sawing against the plastic and the zip tie bursts free. He glances down to see Ingram with this eyes shut tight, his body still and locked up from fear, his throat working incessantly, silently, swallowing down a scream. He doesn’t relax, not right away.

Fusco checks his wrist over, finds the skin blistered and rubbed raw. “OK,” he says. “Guess that could be worse. We’ll get you fixed up after you take a shower.”

Ingram’s eyes open. His brows are furrowed, curious.

“Dunno if you remember, but you got doused in gasoline,” Fusco tells him. “You should probably wash up.”

Ingram swallows hard again. “I remember,” he says. He doesn’t move.

Fusco sits heavy on the edge of the bed. “My boss told me the game plan. Some of it. You want to hear?”

Ingram blinks up at him, waiting.

“They want you safe,” Fusco says. “They want me to take you someplace where Samaritan can’t get at you anymore.”

“Where is that?”

“Wish I knew,” Fusco says. “We leave tomorrow. My boss will tell us what to do from there. I’m gonna warn you upfront: we might have to do some stuff that doesn’t make much sense. We’re gonna have to do it fast and there might not always be time to ask questions about why it’s happening or what’s gonna happen next. And I can tell that’s gonna kill you, ‘cause you’re a questions guy, but you’re gonna have to put up with it, OK? ‘Cause we can do it the hard way, if we have to. We can go back to zip ties and me dragging you around all over the place if that’s what it takes. But I don’t want to do that ‘cause it’s a pain in the ass and I think you and me can be partners in this.”

“You’re threatening me,” Ingram says. Not indignantly, just like he’s curious.

“I’m just telling you how it’s gonna go,” Fusco assures him. “I promised my boss I’d keep you safe. I’m not gonna let you get killed on my watch just ‘cause you’re suspicious and stubborn.”

“And I’m supposed to trust in...what? Your loyalty to your boss?”

“You can trust that I saved you once before. And you can trust that I’m in this for myself. I got skin in the game. My boss and I made a deal: you get to your safe place, I get my life back. I’m gonna fight like hell for you, whether you want me to or not.”

Ingram squints up at him, thoughtful. “I don’t know if I trust you, Lionel,” he says. “But I think I believe you.”

“Good enough,” Fusco tells him, rising to his feet. “I’m not picky.”


	5. Chapter 5

Fusco finds what he’s looking for in a downstairs closet: a backpack, a relic from some camping trip. Compact, durable, state-of-the-art, and barely used. If Ingram wasn’t here, Fusco would be upgrading to a better backpack right about now. But if Ingram wasn’t here, Fusco wouldn’t be here either, so he brings it upstairs and throws it on the bed with the other stuff.

Ordinarily, he’d never tell anybody what to wear. On what authority, you know? But he knows better than Ingram what’ll be good to wear for this trip they’re about to go on: dress warm and in layers, practical and easy to move in, no bright colors or logos, good shoes, thick socks. 

That, and his baseline for rich guys is Finch, pretty much, and he just knows Finch would take his time deciding, fussily examining and discarding each piece. Not that Ingram is Finch. But. Better to take the choice out of it.

Good thing: it seems like Ingram and the guy whose clothes he’s stealing are around the same size, minus some inches around the waist. He lays out undershirts, jeans, sweaters on the bed in rough approximations of outfits. A woman lives here too, and he takes a brush and a couple of hair elastics from her vanity, drops them on top of the backpack. Last, he lays out some gloves, thin and flexible, with slightly sticky grips on the palms and fingers. Fusco’s not sure what they’re for exactly - jogging, maybe? -  but they were in the pockets of one of this guy’s coats, and they’re good enough for his purposes.

He knocks on the bathroom door. “You alive in there?”

A gentle slosh of water, a faint “Mhmm,” is his only answer, but it’s good enough, he guesses.

“I laid some stuff out for you,” Fusco tells him. “When you’re done in there, get dressed, pack up the rest, and put the gloves on. I’m wiping this place down for prints and the sooner you start wearing gloves, the easier it’ll be.” He’s already wearing his own: blue latex, disposable, not so nice.

He wonders if Ingram will have any questions about the fingerprints thing, but he just murmurs, “OK.” More splashing. Fusco would be more annoyed at him for taking a bath instead of a shower if he wasn’t so sure Ingram needed it.

“What’s your shoe size?” Fusco asks. Those dirty slippers lying by the bed aren’t gonna take Ingram very far.

A moment of hesitation. “Nine and a half.” His voice is thick, scratchy.

“OK. I’ll do what I can.” Sneakers would be alright, Fusco thinks as he returns to peeling apart the guy’s wardrobe. Good boots would be better. He’s on his feet a lot, but it’s less running and more walking and walking and standing for what seems like forever. Boots are better for that.

On the guy’s shoe rack, he finds hiking boots in a size 10. “He can double up on socks,” Fusco says under his breath as he puts the boots next to the bed. “Should be doing that anyway. Did you pick this place for the clothes?”

“The clothes were one of several factors, including location, isolation, comfort, and relative safety,” the Machine says. “But they  _ were  _ a factor.”

“Well, I’m a size 8 if you wanna know for next time you pick a hideout,” Fusco says as he clatters down the stairs. “My shoes suck.”

* * *

He’s busy wiping down the kitchen countertops when his burner phone starts to buzz. It almost never does that, but he keeps it tucked in his front pocket all the time, just in case. He knocks over his bottle of bleach in his hurry to pick up.

“Who gave you this number?” he snaps, a grin already forming on his face as he tucks the flip phone against his jaw and wipes up the spilled bleach.

“Your mom, you fucking loser,” comes the answer.

It’s a game they play, he and Shaw. They like to pretend they can’t stand talking to each other. He leans heavily against the kitchen table, closes his eyes, and tries to listen to the noises in the background, paint himself a picture. She’s outside, he thinks. He hears wind, sirens. With Shaw, there’s usually sirens. “How’re you doing, kid?”

“Don’t call me kid,” she pants. He’s not used to hearing her breathe that hard. “You’re not that old yet.”

Not a great compliment, but it’s kinda nice to hear. Seems like all he thinks about these days is how much his back hurts, how fucking old he’s getting.

When she speaks again, her voice is careful, deliberately casual. “Do you remember that time you bought me a beer for Persian New Year?”

“It was champagne, you philistine.” His brow furrows a little. “That rough, huh?”

He would never call himself her security blanket. Not where she could hear him, anyway. But sometimes she’ll quiz him on things like that. Little things that only they know the answer to. Beer or champagne. Falafel or empanadas on stakeout that one time. Springsteen or Dylan on the radio that last night when she drove him and Lee to the airport, their lives hastily crammed into two suitcases. It’s to make sure he’s still him, maybe. God help him if his memory starts to go, he thinks. He’ll only have to falter on one trivia question to never hear from her again.

“It’ll pass.” Her voice is flat, placid, a little more natural. She got whatever she needed from him. “You still breathing?”

“When I can,” he answers, modestly. “You?”

“Not out of lives yet.” She asks, “Is the kid OK?”

A faint pang in his chest. He hadn’t thought of Lee for a couple hours and it feels strange, like when you have to remind yourself to breathe. “He’s doin’ his best. He’s tough, you know?” 

“Not like his old man.”

“You’re hysterical,” he says. “How’s the dog?”

“Vet check-up last month. He’s healthy.” A soft, doubtful pause. “I’m supposed to stop giving him steak, though.”

“You gonna stop?”

“I will give him...less steak.”

“Good. Good.” And then, “You up to anything big?”

“Hard to say,” she says. “Feels like the same old stuff to me.”

Could be true. But it’s also probably what she’d say to him even if she was trapped in a shark tank or being gradually lowered into an active volcano. Shaw’s definition of the same old stuff is kinda flexible. Or maybe he just doesn’t know enough about the same old stuff.

Anyway, she couldn’t tell him if anything was going on, even if she wanted to. They’re not supposed to give out sensitive information over the phone. And most information, it seems, is sensitive.

“I wish I could tell you what I’m doing right now,” he says. 

“Do I wanna know?”

He considers, tries to remember if Shaw knew anything about Nathan Ingram, if she ever showed any interest. Probably not. But then, he wasn’t all that interested either, at the time. Ingram was just one of the known parts of Finch’s life and it was the unknown parts that people tended to get curious about. “I guess I dunno how much it would mean to you,” he admits. “But  _ I _ was pretty surprised.”

“Keep it to yourself then,” she advises. “Unless you found one of those two, I don’t need to hear about it now.”

They both know which two she means. Finch or Reese, alive and well, would be worth breaking protocol for. “No,” he says. “Neither of them. You’re right. Maybe I’ll tell you about it to your face one of these days.”

A surprised grunt. “Am I gonna have to look at your face sometime soon?”

“Could be. I…” He pauses. There’s some kind of commotion on the other end of the line, crashing, thumping, occasional cries of pain. “This a bad time?” he asks.

It takes her a second to respond. “No, you’re good,” she answers at last, breath ragged. “I called you, remember?”

“This, uh. Seems like this might be my last job. Before retirement. Dunno what that looks like in this line of work, but uh…”

There’s a sudden loud, metallic crashing noise and a muffled cry of pain. “So far, it looks like either dying or disappearing forever, but I guess you could break with tradition and get old on a beach somewhere. You want me to visit? I could use a vacation.”

“Kinda seems like I might be...coming to your neck of the woods.” He shuffles his feet on the linoleum floor. “That’s what she said, anyway.”

“You think you’ll be able to come back to New York?” Shaw asks. She doesn’t bother to hide the disbelief in her voice. There’s another loud crash.

“Don’t know how that’s gonna work,” he admits. “But that’s what she told me.”

“You trust her?”

“Don’t you?”

Another crash, this time more final. Shaw breathes deep. “So,” she says, “do most Albanian gangsters fold this easy, or is it just my lucky night?”

“Couldn’t tell you, kid.”

“‘Cause this is like my fifth one. These guys suck.”

They speak a little while longer before making their excuses. Their talks are never long.

* * *

Fusco takes another prowling lap of the first floor, hunting for anything misplaced or misaligned. There’ll be signs that he’s been there, obviously. Missing things. Things he didn’t put back exactly right. But he hopes they’ll be the kinds of things that are found missing bit by bit in the days and weeks after the people who live here come home, that their absence will be blamed on carelessness or travel or a laundry mishap or a still-packed suitcase, hastily put away, if they’re ever noticed at all. Not really missing. Not stolen, anyway.

He’s pretty satisfied by what he sees. Fusco’s had a lot of time to work on the art of never leaving any mark on a space, as if he was never there.

“What are you looking for?” someone asks from what feels like inches behind him, so close and so sudden Fusco almost jumps out of his skin. He whips around to see Ingram standing at the end of the dark hallway, gaunt and lanky and wide-eyed. It’s like he just appeared there out of nowhere. No footsteps, no rustle of clothes, no clink of the hardware dangling from his pack.

“ _ Jesus _ ,” Fusco says, hand pressed over his heart, his heaving chest. “Do I need to get you a bell?”

Ingram regards him quietly there in the dark. “I’m fine,” he says.

Fusco hits the switch on the wall, floods the hallway with golden light that Ingram flinches away from. He looks like a person, which is a good first step. He’s scrubbed clean, faintly pink in the cheeks from the bath. He’s dressed in what Fusco’s pretty sure is a mix of two of the outfits Fusco laid out for him: pants from one, top from another. Fusco knew he’d be fussy. He’s wearing his gloves, which means he can follow directions. His hair is neatly brushed and drawn back in a topknot, away from his face, which means...Fusco’s not sure. That he’s practical, maybe. That he’s not afraid to be an old guy with a bun. 

He looks...thin, still. Tired and bruised and battered. But if Fusco saw him on the street or in a diner somewhere, he doesn’t think he’d look twice. Maybe he’d notice the hair, if anything - “Look at that old guy with the bun,” he’d think, in a half-aware kind of way - but nothing that sticks out. He wouldn’t see Nathan Ingram there. He wouldn’t see the ghoul from the prison either. Just a person, not too memorable.

“You ready to go?” Fusco asks, indicating the backpack slung lazily from Ingram’s shoulder.

Ingram nods.

Fusco glances down at the toes of Ingram’s pristine, unscratched hiking boots. “Shoes fit OK?”

Ingram hesitates. “They’re a little big,” he admits. He says it like a man testing the waters, a man unused to making small complaints.

“You wearing both pairs of socks?”

“No,” he says. His mouth twists, just a little. “No, I didn’t think to do that.”

“You should. It stops you from getting blisters. Reduces friction or whatever. Come on into the kitchen,” he says, waving him along. “We’ll get you fixed up.”

Ingram follows behind him on the way to the kitchen, his long and quiet shadow.

At the kitchen table, Ingram struggles to undo his bootlaces. His fingers shake, and Fusco wonders if he’s still pretty weak or if it’s just been a while since he wore shoes with laces. In psych wards, they take people’s shoelaces away, Fusco remembers suddenly. So they can’t use the string to off themselves. Or they used to. Or they never did at all and it was just a wrong thing that somebody said to Fusco one time and stuck in his head because it was small and sad and ugly. Either way, Ingram figures the bootlaces out. Just takes him a while.

“Will we be doing a lot of hiking?” Ingram asks, still bent over his feet as he pulls on his second pair of socks. He’s still trying to figure out how to talk to Fusco, what kind of tone this situation calls for, and maybe that’s why he says it so casually, like he’s talking to a travel agent.

“Dunno,” Fusco says. He unzips his own pack, starts rummaging. “Doesn’t hurt to plan to, though. If you’re wearing boots while we take a long haul flight and sit on our asses for 13 hours, it’s not that big a deal. If you’re not wearing boots and we have to walk twenty miles through snowy woods, you’ll wish you had ‘em.”

Ingram considers that as he wedges the boots back onto his feet and re-ties his laces, tight. “Better safe than sorry,” he says at last.

“You got it.” Fusco finds what he was looking for: a first-aid kit. Not a really good one, just a little slim one you can roll up and take camping with you. Just for tiny emergencies. “Roll up your sleeves. We should patch up your wrists while we have downtime.”

Ingram sits up straight and makes sudden, startling eye contact. Underneath all his exhaustion, his care, his caution, there’s this calculation behind his stare, this strategist’s curiosity. Like he’s not just trying to figure out how to speak to Fusco in the moment, not just trying to navigate around another human being after almost a decade of solitude. Like he’s looking at Fusco the way you might look at a really big bug you weren’t quite sure how to crush.

Then Ingram lets his gaze drop as he rolls back the ribbed cuffs of his sweater, exposing his bony wrists, and Fusco can’t see calculation in him anymore.

He’s not looking hard enough, maybe.

What he finds is that Ingram’s skin is almost translucently pale, the veins popping blue-green along his forearms. He finds scarring around each of Ingram’s wrists, built-up in a shiny, discolored ring. Not self-harm, Fusco thinks, not so deliberate. Just marks from the last time Ingram pulled too hard at his cuffs, and the time before that, and the time before that. Years to work on a scar like that, and Fusco feels faintly guilty adding to it.

He finds that Ingram locks up a little when Fusco swabs his wounds with alcohol. His muscles go tight, his breathing tenses, but he doesn’t make a sound and none of it shows in his face. 

“You nervous at all?” Fusco asks him as he squeezes antiseptic gel out of a sachet and onto his gloved fingertips. “About being outside again.”

“I’d be less nervous if I knew where we were going.” Ingram’s eyes shut tight as Fusco rubs the gel into his wrists.

“Ain’t that the truth, pal,” he says, taking no particular care as Ingram grits his teeth. “But, uh, between you and me, you get used to it. Destination’s not all that important, most of the time.” His voice drops a little. “It’s OK, you know, if you’re nervous. Man locked in a room for the better part of ten years, you expect him to be a little out of touch. Unfit, maybe. Shoving you back into the big, wide world right outta nowhere...be weird if you weren’t a little on edge.”

“If you’re asking if I’m going to be a burden to you,” Ingram says, slightly too loud, “you don’t need to be coy.”

“OK.” Fusco rolls his shoulders, sits back in the kitchen chair. “We can do it that way if it’s easier on you. You gonna be a problem for me?”

“No,” says Ingram, softly, firmly.

“Can you run? Or walk for a long time?”

“I’ve found ways to keep active.”

Fusco raises an eyebrow. “How active can you be in a cell? It’s not like you’ve been training for a triathlon.”

“By the looks of things, neither have you,” Ingram answers, icily.

The kitchen falls deathly quiet. “Fair enough,” Fusco says after a time. “How’s your health? You sick at all?”

“It’s been a while since my last checkup,” Ingram acknowledges. “I’m...I haven’t been eating well. Or enough. I’m aware of that. But I’m not sick. I don’t have a good enough social life to catch anything.” A tiny, mean smile twitches at the corner of his mouth.

That’s fair too. 

“You gonna cause trouble?” Fusco asks him. He peels back the packaging on a bandage. “I don’t mean by not keeping up, ‘cause I can work with you on that. I mean by being a dick.”

He focuses on bandaging up the angry welts on Ingram’s wrist, so he’s only half-aware of the stare Ingram’s fixing him with, the hard and curious look.

“I’m...I’m not going back,” Ingram says. “To that place. To that room. I don’t know if I trust you, but if you’re my way forward, if you’re going to lead me anywhere other than that...I’m not going to stand in my own way.”

Fusco ties off bandage around Ingram’s wrist, pats him gently on the forearm. “Glad we can see eye to eye on all this.”

* * *

You can put Ingram to work, he finds. Not hard work - there’s a boniness to his frame that stops Fusco from asking him to move any heavy shit - but you can pass him bleach and tell him to erase the laundry room of any trace of human DNA, and he can make that happen. That makes Fusco feel a little better about the whole thing. It was easy to assume Ingram might be a basket case ‘cause of what he’s been through, or a priss ‘cause of where he comes from. If he’s only a quiet guy who works hard, maybe this won’t be so bad.

Fusco catches himself listening for Ingram as he moves about the house, ears pricked for the squeak of wet cloth on metal, for the harsh rasp of his breath, for the clomping sound of his boots as he sprints out the back door. Not something Fusco thinks will definitely happen, not necessarily. It’s just a worry he has. There’s a sharpness to Ingram, like all of him was whittled down and whittled down until he’s barely there anymore, but the little bit that’s left is hard as steel and slices like a scalpel.

He should be prepared for Ingram to cut and run if he sees an opportunity. 

He’s just starting to think  _ This place looks like I was never here _ when the Machine speaks to him: “You have to leave through the back.”

“That’s the plan,” he answers her under his breath. “I put the backpacks right by the door.”

“Now,” she says. “Quietly.”

His heart leaps. He darts as quietly as he can to the laundry room, where Ingram’s looking the place over with a quizzical eye, sponge in hand. “I think I’m done in h…” he begins but Fusco shushes him, puts the sponge on the shelf next to the other cleaning products and seizes him by the sleeve of his jacket.

“We have to go,” Fusco hisses. 

He can see the question in Ingram’s face, but to his credit, Ingram lets himself be dragged out of the room and down the hall. 

Fusco scoops up both their packs on one arm and fiddles the door open. “Do I lock…?” he whispers.

“No time,” the Machine answers, and that’s when he hears it, all the way across the house. The sound of the front door unlocking.

“Fuck,” Fusco breathes very softly as he shoves Nathan ahead of him into the back garden.

As he eases the door shut gently, so gently, he hears two voices sighing with relief, hears a woman say in Russian, “Finally home.” Not Samaritan, like he was afraid of. But the homeowners, people who might call the police if they found two strange men in their back garden, people who would be listened to if they did. So, nearly as bad. He seizes Ingram by the back of the jacket and pushes him across the garden towards the wall. 

There’s a gate in the wall, wooden and heavy, but the latch is rusty and the hinges scream if you force it open. Fusco knows; he tried it when he first started squatting in the house. Not gonna work for right now. They need to be quick and quiet. When he reaches the wall, he drops to one knee, makes a cradle with his hands. “You’re going over,” he whispers to Ingram.

“What’s…?”

“ _ Go. _ ”

Ingram takes a couple steps back, wide-eyed, and Fusco’s about to get up and really lay into him about doing  _ what I say when I say it _ when suddenly Ingram darts forward, plants his boot squarely into the hollow of Fusco’s cupped hands and vaults himself up and, with only a few scants seconds of struggle, over the wall in a fluid, self-possessed movement.

Fusco wonders if maybe he shouldn’t have made Ingram stay behind and give him a leg up instead. He tosses his pack over the wall, then Ingram’s. They don’t make much of a sound on the other side, which he thinks means Ingram caught them. That just leaves himself as the last piece of luggage.

Fusco’s never been much of a wall-jumper. Short legs, hefty frame, heavy body: he’s just not built for it. Still, there’s lights coming on in the house and he’s all too aware of the windows that overlook the garden and there’s a wall between him and freedom, so he’d better learn. He copies Ingram’s few steps backward, his running start, and then leaps forward. 

He makes it a little ways up, sneakers hunting footholds in the brickwork, fingertips scrabbling at the top, but he doesn’t quite have the purchase, so he skids to the ground. 

In the house, more lights come on. Somewhere, a dog is barking.

Fusco picks himself up, gets an even bigger running start, really jams his foot against a brick that sticks out, and hoists himself up as best he can.

He gets his arms over, his fingers scratching for purchase against rough brick, barking his chin against the top of the wall, legs kicking on the other side, and it’s progress, technically, but it isn’t ‘cause he’s only hanging on. He’s got nothing to push himself over, just his arms getting weaker and his legs getting banged up and Ingram peering up at him from the other side of the wall. There’s a kind of a question in his eye, a shy and mean little thought.  _ I could just go right now. I could just walk away. _

And then, suddenly, he’s climbing the wall to meet Fusco, gingerly seeking out the crags and cracks in the wall with his fingertips and toes until the two of them are eye to eye, until he’s grabbing Fusco by the back of the jacket and dragging him over the wall.

Fusco lands with an ungraceful thud in the alley beyond the wall, and he’s no acrobat maybe, no rock-climber either, but he knows how to get up when he’s knocked down. He forces himself to his feet with only a little bit of self-pity to find Ingram peering down at him, head cocked and half-concerned. 

He picks up the bags from the ground, slings his pack over his banged-up shoulder, thrusts Ingram’s pack into his chest. “Keep moving,” Fusco whispers. The dog’s still barking, wherever it is.

“Left,” the Machine says in his ear helpfully, so Fusco turns left and starts walking up the alley between the tight rows of fancy houses.

“Thanks for the head’s up,” he snarls as Ingram struggles to keep pace beside him. “What was that, a whole ten seconds?”

“I wanted to make sure you had time to clean,” the Machine says.

“I would’ve given up a spotless laundry room in exchange for not having to climb a  _ fucking wall _ tonight.”

“How is that  _ my  _ fault?” Ingram asks, keeping his voice low.

“I’m not talking to  _ you _ ,” Fusco snaps at him. 

The Machine’s voice floats in his ear, serene and a bit ginger. “I’ll take that under consideration for next time. But you  _ did  _ successfully escape. And the homeowners haven’t raised any alarm.”

Fusco exhales, rolls his shoulders back. “Yeah, yeah. Count your blessings.”

“You don’t have to count any blessings,” she says. “Just trust me.”

“Yeah.” Fusco lets his gaze drift sidelong to Ingram, who is giving him a look like he’s the crazy person on the subway, the guy yelling on the street corner, and he’s not quite sure what he’ll do. “Sorry about that,” Fusco says softly. “I’m on the phone with my boss most of the time. I was yelling at her, not you.”

Ingram nods, slow and skeptical.

“Thanks for the help back there,” Fusco adds. “You did good.”

Ingram raises a hand as if to brush it away. “It was no problem,” he says. And then, “So your boss knew they’d be coming home right then, huh?”

“Yeah,” he says. “She knows most things.” 

“How?”

“That’s her business, pal.”

Ingram’s mouth has a doubtful set to it as they approach the end of the alley. “Does your boss know where we’re going to go from here?”

“Right,” says the Machine.

“Sure,” Fusco tells him as he turns right and continues up the street. “This way.”


	6. Chapter 6

It’s not all that long of a walk, but he can already hear the change in Ingram’s breathing. After that display at the wall, Fusco let himself hope that Ingram was fitter than he seemed. That might still be true, but he’s still a guy who spent the last decade locked up, and he’s starting to wheeze a little in the cold night air.

Fusco slows down just a little, enough so Ingram can keep pace with him.

“So,” Fusco asks, wanting to fill space, “you climb a lot of walls?”

“Not so much,” Ingram pants, “but I’ve had nothing but time. Months and months with nothing to do. No one to talk to. Not even anything to read. Eventually, I resorted to push-ups and jumping jacks just to have something to do. Just to get my heart pumping. I’ve kept fit primarily out of boredom.”

“No kidding.” They keep walking, steps echoing on the nearly empty street. “Is that it? All those years, they just had you cooling your heels in a cell?”

Ingram keeps his head down and stays quiet except for the rasp of his breathing.

“You said they wanted you ‘cause of the work you and Finch did. I got some idea about what that means, but…”

“Make a left turn up ahead,” The Machine says.

She leads them to a deserted park. If he were in a more relaxed mood, Fusco would think it was kinda pretty. It’s just a little thing, just a couple blocks worth of land, bare and twisted trees, a metal playground, benches, all draped in a layer of fresh, undisturbed snow. Blazing white in the moonlight, it’s all kind of quiet and unearthly.

“You can sit here,” the Machine says as she guides them to a wooden bench along the gravel path. “While you wait.”

Fusco clears snow off the bench with his sleeve so there’s a dry space where he and Ingram can sit side by side, shoulders crushed together, hunched against the cold.

“Not that you have to spill your guts,” Fusco adds after a little bit, plucking idly at a stray thread on his gloves. “That whole thing that happened to you, that’s your business. If I need to know, I’ll hear about it. But if you ever wanna tell anybody about it...just for the sake of telling another person, I mean. I just want you to know that I know how to keep my mouth shut. That’s all.”

Ingram doesn’t say a word. Fusco can feel him shivering through his jacket. He leans into him slightly.

He thinks to himself that the two of them look like spies in a movie. Not in a cool James Bond way, but in a realistic way. Two gray, out-of-shape enemy bureaucrats, tensely and boringly liaising. Except they’re not even doing that much. They’re not even talking.

It’s good luck they don’t have to wait too long.

At first, she’s a long, dark shape moving along the edge of the park, barely visible amongst the trees. You could almost pretend she wasn’t there at all, that she was just a trick of the eye or a ghost or a waving branch. Then she steps underneath a streetlight and her coat, deep cranberry red, becomes unmissable. She strides along the gravel path towards them with short, crisp, purposeful little steps, a large padded envelope clutched protectively to her chest. As she comes closer, he can pick out some of her features: dark skin, a silken scarf the color of night, a beret perched on top of her head like a snow cap, the bulge in her coat pocket that screams “poorly-concealed gun”.

Fusco stands up, knees creaking, as she approaches.

“Friend of yours?” Ingram asks under his breath.

“Probably,” Fusco answers. “Hey there,” he says to the woman, not too loud but as warm and friendly as he can stand to be right now.

She moves right past him, their shoulders brushing as she makes a beeline for the bench. She sits down, ramrod straight, eyes wide, not acknowledging him in the slightest, the envelope balanced neatly on her knees. This close up, he can see her pulse flickering in her throat, just above the fold of her scarf. He can also see the earpiece in her ear, nearly hidden by her hat.

“I told her you’d be sitting,” the Machine says reproachfully.

He sighs, settles back down on the bench again, wedging himself between Nathan and the woman. He keeps his eyes front too. When in Rome, he guesses. Or Moscow, but who’s counting. “I _was_.”

Apologetically, the Machine says, “She’s a little stiff.”

Ingram’s peering curiously at them now, eyes darting from Fusco to the woman. “Are you guys OK?”

“I am,” Fusco tells him. “Keep quiet a second.”

Beside him, the woman exhales, slow and shuddering. Then she speaks.

It takes him a second to realize she’s speaking Russian. Not good Russian, although Fusco’s sure his own attempts sound just as bad to native speakers. The pronunciation is labored, mangled, heavily accented but unmistakably Russian, spoken deliberately and carefully, eyes deer-in-headlights round and fearful.

“Respond with the following:” the Machine begins.

“For what?” he snaps. “I can’t understand it and she _definitely_ can’t.”

Ingram leans into his peripheral vision, brow furrowed. Fusco imagines himself as a crazy man ranting on a park bench.

“For _practice_ , Lionel,” she says. “You know how it takes getting used to.”

He does know. Russian wasn’t that bad - he kinda knows Russian - but all that tonal stuff in Chinese gave him hell and French was a nightmare. So he repeats the Machine’s Russian phrase back to his new friend and, satisfied and visibly relieved, she pushes the envelope into his lap. It’s heavier than he expects it to be. She leaps to her feet and starts walking away at a swift, uncompromising clip.

“Wait a second,” Fusco calls after her. “You speak English at all?”

The woman hesitates for a long second before turning around to face him. She looks young. Mid-twenties, if that. Too young to be wrapped up in something like this, although maybe that’s an old man kind of thought. “A little,” she says at last in heavily accented English. Could be French maybe, but Fusco’s no authority.

“You new?” he asks.

She raises one dark eyebrow and peers down at him, stiff and suspicious.

“It’s OK if you are,” he says. “Everybody starts somewhere.”

She’s visibly affronted by the change to the script.

“I just wanna say that you’re smart to have your guard up like that,” he says. “You gotta look out for yourself. But maybe work on looking more like you’re not worried about that kind of thing. Know what I mean?”

Her brow furrows. “I take care of myself,” she says.

“I don’t doubt that. But you stick out more when you’re nervous. Try to look like you think you belong wherever you are. Makes you less suspicious.”

The crease in her brow softens.

He holds up the envelope. “You know what’s in here?”

She shakes her head. “You are not supposed to open it yet.”

“I figured it’d be something like that,” he says. “I was hoping for a sneak peek. Never mind.”

“There are more packages inside, but they were sealed when I found them.” She shrugs. “She never tells me anything.”

He laughs a little. “Me neither. Well,” he says, rising to his feet and holding out one hand, “good luck out there.”

She takes his hand gingerly and pumps it twice, short and efficient, before releasing him, whirling on her heel, and darting off into the night at her swift, nervous clip.

“She’s a work in progress,” the Machine admits.

“I mean, who isn’t?” Fusco reaches down, rests his hand on Ingram’s shoulder. “Come on, we gotta get going.”

“What was that?” he asks, shouldering his pack with a soft groan.

Fusco shrugs. “Just saying hi to a coworker.”

“But who _was_ she?”

“Dunno. I’ve never seen her before.” Already the Machine is whispering new directions in his ear. “This way.”

* * *

Behind him, Fusco hears Ingram’s boots scuffle on the pavement, fights the urge to look around and check on him.

“Are you worried about Nathan?” the Machine asks, saving him the trouble.

“ _Worried_ is a strong word for it,” he says under his breath, “but he seems rough. Dunno if he should be walking around in the cold like this”

“I agree,” she says. “I’ve arranged transportation.”

He listens to her plan. It’s a game they’ve played before, so when the Machine sends them down a dark side street, he’s only a little bit nervous. His fingers itch. Their new ride is a gray sedan, grubby and inconspicuous.

“Is this your car?” Ingram asks as Fusco sets his pack down on the hood of the car.

“It’s about to be,” Fusco murmurs under his breath, rummaging deep into his pack until he comes up with a bent and rebent piece of wire that used to be a coat hanger in another life. “Help me straighten this thing out, will you?”

Minutes later, he’s got it unbent, hooked at one end, and he’s feeding it between the window and the weather stripping, deep into the door itself. “So,” he says to Ingram, casually, “you ever break into a car before?”

Ingram leans against the car, watching Fusco’s hands work with bright and curious eyes. “Did a little joyriding as a kid,” he says, “but I always had the keys.”

“Pickpocket, huh?” Fusco says as he feels the hook scrape against something. With a sharply drawn breath, he leans into his work.

“No,” Ingram says, sounding almost wistful. “I was a valet.”

Fusco raises an eyebrow. “Rich guy like you?”

“Summer job,” Ingram says. “I was told they build character.”

“Did it?”

“It was at a country club my father had a stake in, so, uh...no. Not as intended, anyway.”

The door unlocks with a clunk. No alarm. “OK,” Fusco, trying not to audibly sigh with relief as he drags the coat hanger out of the door. “Get in.”

Ingram doesn’t argue, bundles up his pack against his chest and nestles into the stained passenger seat. He waits like that, long legs drawn up for lack of room in the footwell, while Fusco fiddles with the wiring under the steering column. “I guess you weren’t a valet,” he murmurs.

Fusco chuckles. “No,” he says. “No, I was not.”

“So, how’d you learn to steal a car?”

“On the job.” He learned young: academy young, beat cop young. He used to carry a slim jim with him, specialized for the task of opening up a car he wasn’t supposed to get into, up until a couple of years ago. He even knows how to get into cars with automatic locks versus manual locks, like this one has. Being a cop sets you up to be a pretty OK criminal, should things go that way.

The wires spark between his fingers, the engine stutters to life. Fusco sits up straight, settles into his seat. The seat belt is frayed, takes some finagling to click into place.

“If you won’t tell me how you learned,” - Ingram pauses, watches him for a while to confirm that Fusco _won’t_ \- “can you at least tell me why you picked this car?”

Fusco cracks his neck, cranes around as he eases the car out of its tight parallel parking spot. “Like why didn’t I pick a Lexus, you mean?”

“Sure,” Ingram shrugs. “Or, out of all the crappy cars we passed on the way over here, why this crappy car?”

It’s not a bad question. “Street was dark,” Fusco says as he pulls out into the street, slow and inconspicuous. “Nice and quiet. Didn’t see any cameras around. Seems like a rough neighborhood, like maybe the people here don’t want the cops coming around. Seems like the car’s too shitty to bother tracking down for most people. And it’s covered in snow and ice, like maybe the owner hasn’t been around for a while.”

“Well done, Lionel.” The Machine sounds genuinely pleased with his little showoff-y detective routine. “Although I do want to reassure you that the drug dealer who owns this car is currently indisposed. He won’t notice it’s missing until we’re long gone.”

So much the better.

Ingram seems only half-satisfied. “You saw all that, just in that moment?”

“Sure.” Kinda. Not in the moment, maybe, but he’s not so dumb that he can’t pick these things up, that he can’t see some things after the fact once the Machine pushes him in the right direction. He hasn’t gone so soft yet. “Think there’s a button to put your seat back if you need the leg room.”

Gratefully, Ingram pauses in search of that button, hands scrambling under his seat and down the side until the seat slides almost violently backward. “It almost seemed,” Ingram says as he pushes his backpack into the footwell, “like you knew it was there.”

“I have an eye for this kinda thing.”

He settles back in the seat, stretching out as best he can. “I’m working it out, you know,” Ingram says. “Who you work for. I think I’ve eliminated the CIA; you don’t seem competent enough.”

Fusco snorts. “I’ve met some incompetent CIA agents. Don’t count me out.”

Ingram tilts his head back. “Even so.” His voice is thick, creaky with exhaustion. “What now?

Fusco leans forward, peers through the grubby windshield. “Beats me.”

“Tell me, Lionel, what do you know?”

“I’m starting to know you’re a pain in my ass,” Fusco murmurs as he makes a hard left turn onto an exit ramp out of the city. “Beyond that, I’m a take-it-as-it-comes kinda guy. Don’t rush me.”

“Can I borrow your earpiece?” Ingram asks. “I’d like to talk to someone who knows what they’re doing.”

“No.”

“Well.” His voice grows softer, almost pleading. “Can I drive a little? It’s, uh, been a while.”

 _Jesus_. Jesus, he bets. A decade under heavy guard means a decade spent nowhere near the wheel of a car, no control over where he is or where he’s going. “No,” Fusco says again. But he tries to say it nice.

“I won’t go rogue, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“It isn’t.”

Voice sharper, more ragged. “I don’t even need the stupid earpiece. Just feed me directions and I’ll…”

“Some other time,” Fusco interrupts. He figures a hand on the shoulder wouldn’t be well-received, tightens his hands on the steering wheel instead. “You need to get some more sleep, Ingram. While you still can.”

Ingram slumps in his chair. “You know something I don’t about what’s going to happen?”

“Nothing specific,” Fusco assures him. “I just know that when you’re traveling like this, there’s not always time to sleep. Gotta take the opportunity when you find it.”

That simple reasoning seems to soothe him and he settles a little, quieter for a time. After a while, Ingram asks, “When do you sleep, Lionel?”

With the city behind them, the road ahead is dark. Fusco flicks his brights on. “When all this is over.”


	7. Chapter 7

Ingram doesn’t sleep as long as Fusco hoped he would.

It’s a little like having a kid at home, he finds. You’re desperate for them to drop off so you can have a beer and put the house in order and get your life even a little bit on track and maybe,  _ maybe  _ get some shut-eye yourself, but before long they’re awake again.

It’s not a perfect metaphor. For one thing, Ingram’s potentially a lot more dangerous than a kid. For another, shut-eye is off the table for Fusco as long as he’s behind the wheel. But that’s OK; there’s a kind of peace to a long, quiet drive, and as he puts the city further behind him, the world becomes quieter, darker. Time to put his thoughts in order.

They’re not helpful thoughts, by and large. Just spasmodic fretting about logistics: where they’re going next, where they’re sleeping next, when he’ll have his next chance to call Lee. Stuff he’s given up on asking the Machine because she tends not to know so far in advance. Right now she’s balancing numbers, weighing security footage in one place against audio of a private conversation in another place against whatever else she’s got going on, waiting for that sweet spot. She’ll tell him when she can, or if she thinks he has to know.

For Fusco, getting his thoughts about these things in order is more like putting them all down, one by one, and burying them deep so he doesn’t have to think about them anymore.

Ingram doesn’t leave him alone with his thoughts for long. He sleeps for only a few hours before he’s fiddling with the radio and peering hungrily out the windows at the scenery whipping by. Fusco can’t fault him for that. He kind of wants to ask Ingram when’s the last time he saw a tree, an open field, the moon, but he figures it’d either be insulting or patronizing, depending on how long it’s been.

What he can fault him for is all the goddamn questions. Fusco thought he made his position on those pretty clear. 

Ingram raps his knuckles rhythmically on the window. “Do you work for the government of the United States in  _ any  _ capacity?”

“I’m not tellin’ you who I work for,” Fusco says for the fourth time in the last fifteen minutes. “But for the record, no.”

“But you  _ are  _ an American.”

No point in denying that. Not with this accent. “Sure.”

“And you at least lived in New York at one point.”

That’s another thing he can’t really deny, but it feels like a defeat to admit it. He remains stubbornly, bitterly silent, gazing into the pool of weak yellow light that the headlamps cast on the road ahead of them.

Ingram’s kind enough to let it go. “You know how I disappeared? Or when, at least?”

Fusco frowns, nods. “The ferry explosion?”

“The ferry explosion,” Ingram repeats. “I don’t remember it. I remember what happened in the minutes before and I remember everything that came afterwards, but...the important parts are missing. I need to know what happened.”

_ What happened? _ Well, he wasn’t on the scene that day, of course. Wasn’t his beat. He was in homicide and that thing rocketed way above any cop’s pay grade the second people started throwing around the T word. But you know, that kinda thing happens in your city, everybody’s gotta circle up, come into work, show that there’s still people trying to keep things under control. He thinks he might’ve been off that day. He thinks he might’ve bitched to Stills or someone like that about coming into work on his day off. Not seriously, just a small gripe in the midst of panic.

He hopes he wouldn’t say that if it happened today. But he really does love complaining, so it’s hard to be sure.

“Lot of people died,” Fusco tells him at last. “Around 50, I think. Including you. It was a, um, a terrorist attack. Guy with a van full of C4. That’s what they said, anyway.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“I take these things with a grain of salt now. For example, I noticed you’re not dead.”

Ingram makes a small, approving sound. “Well-spotted. And Harold survived too?”

Fusco tenses a little, brow furrows. “Never knew he was there.”

“Well, he was. He’s the last thing I remember before…” Ingram’s voice seems to fade in his throat. He sinks further into his seat.

“I never knew that about him,” Fusco murmurs, pushing forward against whatever’s making Ingram sink. “That’s rough, the two of you being caught up in that. Was it just bad luck, or…?” He lets the question hang unfinished.

“You’re asking if we were the targets,” Ingram says. Not asks, not really. Just floats the statement curiously, delicately. “Seems pretty likely, doesn’t it?”

“Samaritan?”

“Could be,” Ingram concedes. “But I’m inclined to think it was Washington. We gave them enough reasons.”

Fusco shivers a little. 

“But Harold survived?” Ingram asks again.

“Well, I didn’t meet him until...must’ve been at least a year after the ferry attack. Assuming you and I are talking about the same guy: yeah, he lived.”

Fusco allows himself a sidelong glance at Ingram and is surprised to discover he’s being studied with what he can only describe as benevolent suspicion. 

It takes him a second to realize why. “You don’t believe me, do you? That I knew him.”

Ingram shakes his head thoughtfully. “Not yet. You’re doing a decent job. You haven’t made any claims that seem impossible or completely out of character. But…”

“But I don’t fit the part. I don’t look right. I don’t dress like somebody Finch would associate with or I don’t talk like somebody Finch would waste his time talking to. Is that it?”

Ingram’s knowing half-smile falters slightly.

“Or I’m just not specific enough for you.” The back of his neck is hot all the sudden. “I just say I knew the guy; I’m not giving you his middle name or his favorite color or how how he takes his tea or whatever. I’m not winning any Harold Finch trivia nights. You’re not gonna get that from me. We weren’t like that.”

Ingram asks him, “Like what, Lionel?”

Fusco takes a deep breath, exhales smooth and slow. “Close, I mean. He kept things professional, pretty much. If he was there at the attack on the ferry, I guarantee he wouldn’t have told me about it. He wasn’t the sharing type.”

“So you didn’t know much about him,” Ingram breathes, “and he didn’t know much about you.”

Fusco snorts. “He knew everything about me. He knew everything about everybody. Guy couldn’t mind his own goddamn business.”

“I believe you,” Ingram says at last. “I’m having trouble imagining why he would keep you around, but I believe you.”

“That’s all I’m asking for.” Fusco thinks a little. “He had a limp.”

“What?”

“Finch. He had a really bad limp the whole time I knew him. He have that when you knew him?”

“...No.”

Fusco rolls his shoulders back. “Could be related. Something to think about.”

They fall painfully, unsteadily quiet. When Fusco glances at him, Ingram’s got his head sunk down to rest his chin on his chest, his gray-blonde hair pale against the dark scratchings of the trees whipping past their window.

Maybe he’ll go back to sleep.

“I need more information,” Ingram says at last. 

“Maybe you do, but not from me.”

“I’m not…” There’s a thin note of anger in his voice that he pushes down, swallows up. “I’m out of touch. The world has changed since I’ve been away; that much is obvious. I haven’t held a phone in my hand since I lifted one off a guard something like...five years ago, maybe. I had it for 15 minutes. It was barely recognizable as a phone. I can’t even imagine the advances that have been made since then.”

“They’re, uh, something. Not  _ that  _ different since then, but...”

“I’d like to use your phone to do some research.” He’s sitting up in his seat, bright-eyed and feverish. “I need to catch up.”

Fusco thinks of Ingram back in the bedroom, gulping down glass after glass of water. This isn’t so different. “You’re out of luck, pal. I’m pretty sure my phone was out of date when you got yourself kidnapped.” He fishes in his pocket, shows the flip phone to Ingram for just a second. “Burner. Hard to trace, easy to ditch. My boss insists.”

Ingram’s disappointment isn’t audible, but Fusco watches out the corner of his eye as Ingram’s shoulders slump. Fake-hopeful, he asks, “You never use anything more...advanced?”

“Not if I can help it. And for now, you shouldn’t either. If you start Googling...I dunno. Harold Wren. Samaritan. Your ex-wife’s name. All the nice shit people said about you at your funeral. That kind of search history might draw the wrong kind of attention.”

“Astute, Lionel,” the Machine says in his ear. “Thank you for anticipating my position on this matter.”

“They got American newspapers out here in some places if you know where to look. We’ll find you one next chance we get. Read it by candlelight. Churn some butter, maybe. A real throwback.” Fusco casts a sidelong glance at Ingram, who’s looking thwarted and miserable. “I know that’s not gonna tell you everything you want to know, but it’s a start.”

Ingram opens his mouth, seems to decide against whatever he was about to say, and then closes it again. “Little paranoid, Lionel,” he says, leaning back in his seat, “don’t you think?”

“No. I really don’t.”

“Fine, fine.” Ingram rubs his temples. “Can I at least ask  _ you  _ some basic questions?”

“‘Cause that’s gone great so far.”

“Secrets aside, I just need...general information. About the world. About what’s happened in the past ten years. Can you do that for me?”

“I’m not exactly up on my current events.”

“I don’t care. Just. Anything. Anything you can tell me. I don’t care if it’s wrong.”

A ball of guilt settles heavy in the pit of his stomach. This poor guy’s so hungry for information he’ll even take half-remembered scraps. He’ll take a human voice. It can’t hurt, can it? How could it hurt? “Fine. Can’t promise I’m a news buff, but I’ll do the best I can for you. Shoot.”

Ingram breathes a sigh of relief over his tiny victory. “We’ll start with an easy one: who’s the president now?”

Fusco winces. “Pass.”

“That’s not a  _ secret _ .”

“I know it’s not,” he says. “It’s just bad news.”

“It’s  _ news _ .”

“You’re already in a lousy mood,” Fusco advises. “Ask me about something else. We’ll come back to that.”

Ingram sulks beside him. “You said you worked for Harold?”

“Lemme clarify: when I said ‘ask me something else’, I meant ‘some other news,’ not ‘my goddamn personal life that I already told you I’m not sharing’.”

Ingram’s sitting upright, staring daggers into him. “What did Harold hire you to do?”

It’s at that point that the Machine happens to say, “Lionel, would you please veer right and run the car off the road?” and Jesus Christ, what a relief that is. He jerks the wheel to the right without even thinking. There’s no barrier to contend with, just a slight dip on the side of the road that funnels into thick, wild underbrush, scrubby and frosted with ice. The car bounces as it leaves the asphalt, as snow crunches under the tires, as it rockets into the dark of the woods.

“Give me a shout if I need to course correct,” Fusco murmurs to the Machine under the sound of Ingram’s shout of horror and branches whipping against the windshield and scraping against the sides of the car and the suspension grinds and screams as it navigates territory it was never meant to.

He doesn’t need to course correct. The car rolls to a stop deep in a thicket, swathed in darkness and coated in heavy snow and the horrible grinding sound fades to deathly quiet. 

“This is fine, Lionel,” she tells him.

“Oh. Good.” His voice shivers. He and Ingram sit together a second, hearts hammering, too shaken to move, no sound but their own gasps for air and the whir of the heater.

“What the  _ hell _ ,” Ingram pants, “is  _ wrong  _ with you?”

Fusco flexes his fingers on the steering wheel, finds they’re ready to let go after a little bit. “I think we’re ditching the car,” Fusco tells him. He fiddles with the key. The headlights flicker out, the heater falls quiet. Fusco opens his door and it strikes the trunk of a thick tree, sending down a soft shower of snow. He has to squeeze out through that little gap, stomach sucked tight. He slams the door behind him.

The woods are dead silent for a blissful instant and he breathes deep in the frosty air, exhales a cloud of steam. He rubs his hands together against the cold. After a little bit, his heartbeat finally steadies.

Then Ingram figures out how to get his door open.

Ingram’s side of the car is shoved up tight against snow-covered bush and he has to fight with it to get out, furiously snapping branches and sending up clouds of dry, powdery snow that coats his hair and gathers in the folds of his coat. “ _ Why _ ?” he whispers, distraught.

“Boss’s orders, pal. Sorry I didn’t warn you.”

“The car’s fine,” Ingram hisses, whacking a branch for emphasis. “Or it  _ was _ . Did someone find out we stole it?”

“Dunno,” he says, wading through the snow to get the bags out of the backseat. “You have all your stuff? I don’t think we’re coming back.”

Ingram stares at him in disgust.

As he’s pulling the backpacks out of the footwells and putting them on top of the car to keep them relatively dry, Fusco whispers to the Machine, “ _ Do _ people know we took it?” 

“Not yet. And if the owner becomes aware that it’s missing, he may choose not to report it, because of the incriminating items in the trunk. You have a significant head start.”

Head start on what, Fusco’s not quite sure.

“Nobody knows,” he assures Ingram. “We’re just where we need to be right now, that’s all.”

“Disguise the car,” the Machine instructs him, the soft rise and fall of her voice cutting through Ingram’s grumbling as he pushes against the bush to retrieve his hat and scarf from the passenger seat. “But open the trunk first.”

“Got it. Hey,” he says a little louder, interrupting Ingram’s furious muttering, “do me a favor and pop the trunk?” 

Ingram sputters to a stop, blinks at him through the gap between the seats. 

“There’ll be like a thing you pull on the driver’s side,” Fusco explains, miming with his hand.

Ingram’s eyes suddenly have that ice-chip quality to them. “I don’t work for you,” he says. His voice is soft and somehow dangerous. It’s wrong on a guy who’s been through what Ingram’s been through.

It throws Fusco, for just a second. “Yeah, but you’re up in front,” he says. “I know you don’t work for me but work  _ with  _ me here, pal, even a little bit.”

Ingram’s gaze softens just the faintest bit, and then he’s crawling across the gap to the driver’s seat. “Think that’s it,” he mutters as he gropes around in the gloom of the car’s footwell. “What’s in the trunk?”

Fusco stands up, slaps the hood of the car. “Let’s you and me find out.”

He watches for a while as Ingram putters around, legs dangling out the passenger side. At last, there’s a soft thunk and the trunk lifts a little under his hand. Fusco pushes it the rest of the way open and stands there, a little bit thoughtful.

He’s staring down at a sawn-off shotgun.

“Oh, hello,” Fusco murmurs as he lifts it up, hefts it in his gloved hands. “Who’s this for?”

“Not that your current firearm isn’t adequate, Lionel,” she says, “but I thought something more...visually compelling might help.”

“Interesting.” He finds a box of shells in the trunk, tucks it away in his bag. “Who are we impressing today?”

“You’ll see.”

“Suspenseful,” he murmurs. To Ingram, he says, “We’re gonna have to disguise the car. Find some branches, grab some snow, help me cover it up.”

Ingram backs into the bush again, yanking his hat over his red, blisteringly cold ears. “OK,” he says, bending to pick up some fallen sticks. “And then what? We’re in the middle of nowhere. Where are we going to go?”

“We’ll see.” Fusco takes the shotgun out of the trunk. He also grabs a crowbar and a thick bank envelope that feels heavy with promise. “Wherever it is, it’s in walking distance.”

He looks up to find that Ingram has pauses in his search for branches, eyeing the shotgun with a mixture of calculation and uncertainty.

Fusco hefts the shotgun. “This is what was in the trunk, by the way.”

“Oh.”

“You ever fire a gun before?” Fusco asks, watching Ingram’s face very carefully.

He laughs, thin and nervous. “I’m from Texas.”

“Been back lately?”

“No. Obviously. Will you...need me to fire one?” He looks like he’d rather do literally anything else. 

“Hope not,” Fusco tells him, trying to sound apologetic. “But it’s a possibility.”

Ingram diligently spreads the branches over the hood of the car. “I kinda thought it might be.”

“I’m already armed, of course. But I might need your backup for whatever comes next. Not saying you’ll have to shoot anything,” he adds, watching as Ingram’s shoulders tense as he bends to grab an armload of snow, “but if you’re standing next to me holding a shotgun and looking mean, that might open some doors for us. Is that something I can count on you for?”

Ingram turns, brow furrowed beneath his knit cap. “I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking, Lionel.”

“I’m asking if you have my back on this. If I can trust you to listen to me, to roll with the punches. If I can trust you to back me up, here.”

“If you trust me to hold a gun,” Ingram says, voice hard and quiet. 

“If I can trust you to hold it the right way around,” Fusco says, gentler. “To be clear, there’s a hell of a lot of things I don’t trust you about right now, but I don’t distrust you like  _ that _ . Lighten up a little.”

Oddly, he does. His brows lift, his head tilts, his mouth takes on a quizzical curl. “As long as we’re airing our grievances,” he says, his voice shivering, “I think you’re very strange, you’re unstable, you’re violent, I’m not sure your boss really exists and I’m equally unsure that you have any idea what’s going to happen to me, but, for whatever it’s worth, I believe you really do have good intentions.” Even Ingram seems surprised by that conclusion. “And it does seem like we’re traveling in the same direction,” he adds, “so we might as well work together.”

“Aw.” Fusco pushes the shotgun into Ingram’s hands. “Thanks, pal.”

He holds it carefully, with distaste. “I just don’t know if I like where this is going.”

Fusco can’t quite blame him for that. 

Together, they gather up armloads of fallen branches, tease the bracken to drape over the top of the car and support the armloads of snow that Ingram dumps on top of it, and by the time they’re done, the car is almost invisible, a gray glint in a gray wood.

“OK,” Fusco says, brushing the snow off his sleeves. “Let’s get out of here.”

The Machine gives them a direction, and they follow it.

Now that they’re not arguing, the woods are impossibly quiet. It’s just the soft screams of animals, the crunch of their boots in the snow, the velvety dark pierced only by Fusco’s flashlight and some lights in the distance, through the trees. 

He expects Ingram to ask him about those lights, to have to say he doesn’t know something again, but all he hears from Ingram is harsh puffs of breath from just over his shoulder, grim and determined. They push onward, freezing cold and scratched by branches.

There’s a chain link fence between them and the lights, its silhouette scribbled faint against bright white. 

Fusco throws an arm out to stop Ingram as they reach the edge of the treeline. No cameras he can see, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. Better to stay in the dark just now.

Ahead of them lies a flat, barren expanse of asphalt, plowed clear but scuffed up gray and white with frost. There are buildings, low and featureless and cavernous, a glow spilling from one massive entrance. Beginning someplace far out in the field, there’s harshly bright lights drawing a dotted line out into the dark.

“An airfield,” Ingram whispers.

He’s right. Rinky-dink little airfield, probably all local flights, but an airfield just the same. “Looks like we’re catching a flight.”

Ingram grips the shotgun tighter. “Is the fact that I don’t have ID going to be a problem?”

“No,” Fusco breathes. “No problem at all.”

“Don’t suppose we’re going to go around the fence and walk in the front door?”

“Do not suppose that, no.”

Ingram nods, thoughtful. “Over?” He cranes his head back, eyeing the barbed wire that lines the top of the fence.

“Through, I think.” Fusco lets his bag drop to the ground, sinks to one knee, and begins rummaging. “I have bolt cutters.”

“Oh. Boy Scout.”

Fusco looks up at him, raises an eyebrow.

“Very prepared,” Ingram explains, sheepishly. 

“Am I on track so far, boss?” he asks the Machine, not bothering to whisper.

“Very much so. Does he seem amenable?”

Fusco gives Ingram a quick once-over. He’s staring out into the airfield, looking for something. Cover, maybe. An easy answer. His breath comes in tiny, quick, white puffs and he’s rubbing his hands together in a way you might if you needed to press them together, squeeze them tight, anything to stop them shaking.

Fusco murmurs, “Are we strapped for time?”

“Time, as always, is a factor,” she says. “But you can take five minutes, if you like.”

“OK.” Fusco gropes around in the pocket of his coat. “Where’s the warm stuff I packed you? You had a scarf, right?”

“In my bag.” Ingram chuckles shakily. “Do I need to be bundled up for the heist?”

“Don’t be dumb. Find it. You’re gonna need to cover up your face. Do you smoke?” he asks, gesturing with his extremely squashed pack of cigarettes.

Ingram opens his mouth, but for a moment, nothing comes out. “...Used to,” he says at last. “Is now the right time?”

“We’re about to do something crazy. You want one?”

Ingram casts a nervous look across the airfield, flexes his fingers. “Guess so.”

They lean against a thick tree trunk, outside the eyeline of any cameras that might be watching the fence. Fusco stands. Ingram sits on top of his pack, holding his knees. They blow tiny clouds of smoke into the cold night air, passing one faintly misshapen cigarette back and forth.

“So, no smoking for ten years, huh?” Fusco asks, breaking the quiet.

Ingram nods solemnly. “No  _ a lot of things _ for ten years.”

“We’ll get you a cigar next time we have the time and the money.”

“Oh god,” Ingram murmurs, eyes drifting closed. “I was trying to  _ quit  _ when I got kidnapped. What was I thinking?”

“Maybe it’s good you’re a little deprived for now. If you got total freedom after a decade of that, you probably wouldn’t be able to pace yourself. I know I sure as hell couldn’t.”

“Aren’t you…?” Ingram stops, rearranges. “You’re not worried about this, are you? What we’re about to do?”

“Well, yeah, a little bit. But this is the kinda thing I was talking about before. About having to do stuff that doesn’t always make sense. I know you’re not in a position  where you can afford to really trust anybody right now, but...”

“But you trust her. Whoever your boss is.”

“I do.”

“What do you know about your boss?”

“Plenty.”

“Ever meet her face to face?”

Fusco tries to imagine what that would even look like. Just him in a big server room, him not sure which blinking light to make eye contact with. Him no closer to her there than he would be here or back in New York or at the bottom of the ocean. “Doesn’t work that way.”

“So, to recap: you’ve never seen her, I only have your word for it that she even exists, and you think I should trust her enough to help you hijack a plane?”

“Well, when you put it like that…”

“ _ Why would I do that? _ ”

“Because there’s nothing else for you to do,” Fusco tells him gently. “And because she gives a damn.”

“About you? About me?”

“About everybody.  You’ll see what I mean, after a while.”

Ingram peers around in the dark, eyes wide, and now Fusco knows he’s not looking for a way forward so much as he is a way out of here, and all he’s seeing is trees and snow and darkness and a local airport staffed by strangers, by people he might not even be able to talk to. “Would it have been too much to wait somewhere quiet for a while?” he whispers. “Before all this?”

Fusco takes a very deep, thoughtful drag. He taps two fingers against the shoulder of Ingram’s very good coat. “You’ve been through enough shit for one lifetime.”

“I really…” He swallows hard. “I really have.”

“This’ll be more of it, and I’m sorry about that.”

Ingram looks up at him. “ _ Are _ you sorry?”

Fusco shrugs. “I’m sorry for me. I wanted to keep squatting in that house for a while.”

“I did make a good faith effort to give you some extra time in the house,” the Machine interrupts. “Those homeowners had a very difficult trip home. No less than five flight cancellations. Multiple layovers. Traffic like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Thanks, boss.” Ingram jumps like he does every time Fusco speaks with the Machine. Fusco presses on. “We need to get going again?”

“I’m afraid so, Lionel.”

“That’s alright. I’m tired of standing out here in the cold.” 

He stands upright. Ingram’s still sitting on his pack, back against the tree, shotgun held tight in his hands. 

Fusco taps his shoulder again. “Coming with me?”

“Seems like I don’t have much of a choice.”

“You don’t. I mean, I guess I could knock you out again and drag your unconscious ass through the whole hijacking thing, but that sounds kinda hard.” He offers Ingram his hand, pulls him to his feet. 

“Think you could take me a second time?” Ingram asks as he rises to his full height.

“I don’t think, I know.” He pats Ingram hard on the arm. “Maybe try me later, after a couple days rest and a steak or something, stringbean.”

“I guess that’s my motivation to stick with you.”

“Whatever helps. Hang on, your…”

Ingram’s scarf droops loose around his neck. Fusco rewraps it to cover his nose and mouth, jerks his woolen cap down low so only his eyes are visible.

“There you go, Mr. Billionaire,” he murmurs. “So nobody hounds you for autographs.”

“Thank you,” Ingram says, muffled.

“No problem. Let’s go hijack a plane.”


End file.
